Though I think chatter about when China is going to knock off America as the world’s superpower is kind of silly — we’re moving toward a multi-polar world and when America recedes, as it undoubtedly will, the power will be spread around — it’s nonetheless interesting to compare how the two countries are trying to compete.

One big thing America does better than China, it seems to me, is celebrate creativity and experimentation in its school system. The Chinese school system –and yes, I will gladly generalize about a billion people! — seems incredibly focused on churning students through the standardized test system. Chinese students are under enormous pressure to get really, really good at following rules. The American system, while dancing alarmingly closer to this kind of attitude, still in theory promotes creativity. Students are taught it’s OK to invent and rebel.

How China teaches driving — more Chinese people are taking to the roads — is a good example of this difference in philosophy. Peter Hessler, in the Nov. 26th New Yorker, reports on Driver’s Ed China-style. It’s not available online but summarized by today’s WSJ:

The steps needed to get a license sound rigorous and standardized but emphasize arcane theory over practice. The mandated 58 hours of training involve drilling students to perfect hard tasks such as driving on planks barely wider than the car’s wheels. Students have little training on the roads themselves.

Mr. Hessler says the written test’s emphasis on bizarre driving conundrums shows China fitting its road rules to its neophyte drivers and traffic, rather than the other way around. The questions in the study book — which cover topics such as what to do if a car breaks down on a train track — "didn’t teach people how to drive, it taught you how people drove."

Drilling students to perfect hard tasks, arcane theory over practice. Sounds like many classrooms. I think Hessler’s line that the system "didn’t teach people how to drive, it taught you how people drove" could be changed for the education system: "it didn’t teach people how to think for themselves, it taught you how other people have thought."

The point here is the only way America will compete against China’s vastly larger numbers is to teach its students how to think creativity and be leaders and rule-creators, not rule-followers. China’s going to provide hundreds of thousands of excellent middle managers. The world still needs founders and CEOs.

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Peter Hessler is as good of a "go-to" person on China as anyone. His book River Town is masterful, and Oracle Bones an impressive follow-up. James Fallows is also an excellent perspective on the country given his many years living in and thinking about Asia.

When I meet sons and daughters of diplomats or globetrotting CEOs, they tend to have a complicated answer to the question, “Where ya from?” They’re not from any one place, really. First Chicago, then Singapore, then Beijing, then Sydney, now Los Angeles. Wherever their parents’ work took them.

I’m an example of the opposite. Same bed, same house, same neighborhood in San Francisco the first 19 years of my life. When someone asks where I’m from, San Francisco is the easy answer. I’m unequivocally rooted from a very specific geography.

Usually, after the “Where ya from?” conversation, both of us envy each other: I envy the son of a diplomat for his travel experience, his worldliness, the comfort he must have in knowing he can be dropped anywhere in the world and make it home. He envies my rootedness, my sense of belonging, my strong sense of identity.

Neither upbringing is objectively better than the other.

But I must say, from my own biased perspective, the college students I’ve met who had a geographically rooted childhood tend to be more confident and happier, if less interesting. The diplomat’s son has an attractive cosmopolitan veneer; but the insecurity which stems from a lack of true “home” somehow also comes through.

Entrepreneurship is essential for a country’s economic success, so studying how easy it is to start and run your own business can be a useful metric for whether a country is headed in the right direction.

In yesterday’s WSJ ($), Mary O’Grady points out that the picture in Latin America is grim:

The World Bank’s annual "Doing Business" survey, released last week, demonstrates the point. The 2008 survey, which evaluates the regulatory climate for entrepreneurs in 178 countries, finds that Latin America and the Caribbean was the slowest reforming region this year and that it "is falling further behind other regions in the pace" of reform.

In many Latin American countries it can take months to file the paperwork to start a business; hiring and firing employees at will is severely restricted; paying taxes is a nightmare.

As someone with a growing interest in the region, I hope this trend can be reversed. If it’s not, a talented young entrepreneur will leave the region and start his/her business elsewhere, a brain drain that most of those economies cannot afford.

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On a somewhat related note, my older brother John just re-located to Quito, Ecuador where he will be teaching English for the next 8 months or so. If you live in Ecuador and want to introduce him to the culture, drop me a note and I’ll connect you two. John is a 2006 graduate of Amherst College, athletic stand-out (nominated for California Mr. Basketball in high school), and he worked for a year at Skadden, Arps, the prestigious New York law firm out of their Palo Alto office. I’m excited and proud that he’s chosen to embark on what will almost surely be a life changing experience.

In the weeks after Christmas I plan to visit Ecuador and hopefully some neighboring countries like Chile, Peru, and Bolivia. Details will be posted as I know them.

Paul Salmonse, an American ex-pat who’s just moved to Berlin, has a great post up about how the urban core of Berlin feels more like the urban core of New York (or any other big city) than more rural parts of Germany.

This is one of the most interesting consequences of globalization — the increased interconnectedness and cultural homogeneity of "global cities" due to broadband internet and cheap air travel, among other things. As Paul points out, an American from Los Angeles, Chicago, or New York is likely to feel as or more at home in central Paris, Tokyo, or Moscow as he would in a small or mid-size town in the U.S.

All these global cities contain a tremendous amount of diversity. This is their commonality: you can eat any kind of cuisine, shop at any kind of store, see every ethnic group represented, consume high quality culture like art and concerts. As Tyler Cowen has argued, globalization has increased diversity within big cities even if comparative diversity has decreased. (Sure, Paris might seem more like San Francisco comparatively speaking, but the cultural diversity within each city has increased thanks to trade and markets.)

International travelers know that it is often easier to fly from global city to global city versus global city to small town. It took just as long for me to fly from San Francisco to upstate New York as it did to fly from San Francisco directly to Tokyo. Los Angeles to Stevens Point, Wisconsin (small airport in midwest) was only a tad shorter after connections and layovers than San Francisco to Frankfurt.

The question, then, related to my review of Sam Huntington’s book, is whether citizens of global cities feel more of an allegiance to their cities, cosmopolitan lifestyle, and globetrotting co-patriots than to their home country and suburban or rural residents, and whether the resulting decrease in nationalism and connectedness to vast swaths of the country’s population should be a cause for concern.

Arnold Kling points me to this few-week old WSJ op-ed by Kay Hymowitz about teens increasingly skipping menial dishwashing jobs in favor of more exotic (and rewarding) corporate internships or service-learning projects such as building houses in Guatemala. Her point is that what’s lost in the paper-shuffling internship is the "humbling self-discipline" that comes from flipping burgers.

She cites "globalization" — the root of all evil! — as one reason why teens are doing less of the low-skilled stereotypical summer job because there are so many immigrants mowing lawns and washing dishes:

And, according to Neil Howe, an expert on age cohorts, kids are so used to seeing immigrants doing that sort of work that they assume "I don’t have to mess with food or cleaning stuff up."

This point is arguable, as is the idea that doing low-level service labor builds character and humility.

Arnold adds:

Her description of teenage extracurricular experience these days seems right on target. Affluent teenagers are spending an incredible amount of time abroad, while they are becoming increasingly out of touch with rural and small-town America.

And this is…bad? Nah. Unfair, but good for the lucky teen.

Hymowitz, in her op/ed, does, though, touch on one big, important idea when it comes to summer jobs: rich teens do mind expanding and usually unpaid internships while poor teens work paid but boring service jobs. It’s a trade-off I’ve seen time and time again: the most stimulating jobs for young people don’t pay well (or at all). By the time you’ve graduated from college, affluent teens have accumulated four years’ worth of impressive, worldly experiences, while less affluent teens have no experiences — just smaller student loans to pay off.

This made me think of the following abstract of this paper, emphasis below by Tyler Cowen:

Is lifetime inequality mainly due to differences across people established early in life or to differences in luck experienced over the working lifetime?  We answer this question within a model that features idiosyncratic shocks to human capital, estimated directly from data, as well as heterogeneity in ability to learn, initial human capital, and initial wealth — features which are chosen to match observed properties of earnings dynamics by cohorts.  We find that as of age 20, differences in initial conditions account for more of the variation in lifetime utility, lifetime earnings and lifetime wealth than do differences in shocks received over the lifetime.  Among initial conditions, variation in initial human capital is substantially more important than variation in learning ability or initial wealth for determining how an agent fares in life.  An increase in an agent’s human capital affects expected lifetime utility by raising an agent’s expected earnings profile, whereas an increase in learning ability affects expected utility by producing a steeper expected earnings profile.