Name: 【TEDx】TEDxWarwick - Noam Chomsky - The Global Shift in Power in Politics
Uploaded: 2014-04-27T07:46:54.000Z
Duration: 15 min 17 s
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about the global shift  in power in politics.

Adverbs of manner

There’s a great deal  of speculation about

whether or when China will displace the United States

which if true would mean that the global system would be returning

to something like what it was before the European conquests,

Just to illustrate the mood with unscientific

I was talking recently to  a professor of history

at one of the Massachusetts'  state colleges,

who told me that at the beginning  of every semester she asks

her students what they think  are the richest countries in the world.

And for the last few years, they've been regularly saying China and India.

Well, you could believe that if you read the headlines.

First, what about wealth  or the health of the society.

it's the Human Development Index comes out every year.

That's about where it was several decades ago.

are not very accessible in this more closed society.

and below the Dominican Republic and Iran.

Cuba, which has been under harsh US attack

also the highest in the Central America and the Caribbean,

India and China also have  extraordinarily high inequalities,

So that means  a well over a billion people

Common discussion ideas, it places the United States enthralled to China's whims.

Well, apart from a very brief interlude, which is now over,

for many reasons that are well understood.

The United States has enormous advantages

has a relatively homogeneous population, one language,

a huge internal market  and rich resources,

The US is about the same as the rest of the world combined

in military expenditures, much more if we can add intelligence.

It's the only country with  hundreds of military bases,

which in fact are regularly used for the exercise of violence.

Actually there’s more fundamental observation.

The entire framework of discussion, though conventional,

The global system is not just an interaction among states,

which pursue some so-called national interest,

which is abstracted from the distribution of domestic power within the society.

That’s the way the matter is usually viewed in commentary

and also in the profession and professional international relations theory.

views the international system roughly in this fashion.

Now, there have always been critics of this view.

Adam Smith was concerned primarily with England.

the principal architects  of government policy

and they make sure that their own interests

but of course far worse  of those who are subject to

what he called the savage injustice of the Europeans.

He was referring particularly to England and India.

Well, today, pretty much the same maxim holds.

It's primarily multinational corporations and financial institutions.

The financialization of the economy  has been in a dramatic change

If you go back to about 1970 in the United States,

financial institutions amounted to maybe 3 percent of gross domestic product.