Reply #101: I accept your points about Weber and the Asians...

[arendt]

not sure about Blacks and Hispanics. Those demographics strike me as quite macho (and therefore anti-intellectual). I haven't seen a lot of Calvinism (i.e., Protestant Ethic) lately. The rich seem to be totally corrupt, third-generation, financial manipulators and outsourcers, while the hard-driving small businessman (the footsoldier of Calvinism) is screwed out of any opportunity by WalMart and all the other big box stores selling cheap Chinese crap.

I am also not sanguine about the survival of tech industry in this country. The Indians have taken a good bite out of the software biz. They and the Chinese have huge pools of really talented folks (I mean the Darwinianly-selected top 1% that win places in their universities) compared to our declining tech enrollments. The Chinese have just taken over the synthetic chemistry biz, thereby throwing large numbers of chemical scientists out of jobs in the U.S. When you look at the cost differentials (10:1 for chemists) in the two places, why should any hi-tech that can be done there stay here? High-tech usually produces tiny, very high value stuff (chips, biochemicals, specialty materials) that is easy to air-freight.

I do agree that historical analogies are guaranteed to fail in the long run. The world is different today. Technology has made it one small town. Perhaps the analogy we need to study is the Italian city-states and their guilds during the Renaissance. Noble families, patronage, Machiavellian scheming, condotieri, Church-State brawling, etc.

Thanks for the comments.

arendt