The biggest damage to America's wealth was a combination of Bush's tax cuts/rebate to the wealthy combined with a cheap dollar to spur exports despite our lower competitiveness. I watched my dollar savings and salary cut more than a half in the currency where I live. So in the 90's we had a strong dollar and still held up exports, a sign of competitive products and services. Now we compete with commodity bullshit and dump our stuff around the world to keep our balance sheet up. Yet some want to make the situation worse - push our costs up, increase barriers to trade, go isolationist, screw the rest of the world. I don't think they understand what's been going on, so what they're suggesting is very dangerous.

We have mostly eliminated war. Since 1989/1992 perhaps another quarter of the planet has gone democratic, and even those that haven't have opened up tremendously. Much of this openness is driven by money, economic opportunity that trumps fighting with neighbors, and the easy entry into global trade means backwaters like Vietnam and Indonesia and Thailand can put together production and get into the mainstream without too much trouble, and that goes 5-10 times for internet-led services. All this democratization also means there are a ton more people available for work no longer hidden behind iron curtains, and offshoring has proceeded even though it's no free lunch - laws of productivity vs cost, including transportation and communication difficulties and time zone/land differences all cut into the benefits. Those people will naturally compete with our internal labor market, and that's a cost we have to figure out how to bear and ameliorate.

China is a peculiar entrant. By far the biggest pool of available labor, its 1-child policy also ensured that pool wouldn't grow. So as China rose up the learning curve and took over much of the world's production (screwing many traditional US production jobs in the process), its payrate would rise and its ability to expand would be bounded, so the bargain days where offshore benefits greatly exceeded disadvantages would end. That is happening now, though fracking has brought down oil costs & thus the transportation penalty. Automation has also been lowering the human labor needs on many production tasks, so while fewer jobs, they're more skilled and don't benefit by being offshored to distant lands.

The US as the world's economic powerhouse has made this happen. China didn't know how to sell and still barely does, and we gave it the volume to make it costworthy. Now Asian trade has a life of its own, though we still lead in a number of areas of critical innovation, branding, and out-of-the-box continual improvement. Our productivity is still much better than most places, and our market focus is better and our access to cheap risky flexible capital is much better.

But if we start putting up barriers, the real revolution will begin - recessions in opening countries on the edge will drive workers and leaders back into dog-eat-dog, strongman, freedom limited scarcity that creates wars and tensions. China has been building its military capabilities, and while the current path leads peacefully to retirement for much of its population, but if the strain is too much, they have no problem pulling another occupation of a nieighbor like Tibet or Xinjiang. Indonesia as a Muslim country with Buddhist influence has been largely resistant to Islamic fanaticism, but the tossing out the Dutch in the 50's and the bloodbath with the Communists in the 60's and the crackdown in East Timor in the 70's aren't so long ago. The Philippines is also ripe for social unrest. Bangladesh had its military chaos in the 70's. Vietnam still is largely closed governmentally, and Burma is just recently barely emerging from its whole military-led society. India despite its high-tech embrace is stuck with still expanding population until mid-century while its decision making remains stilted and slow to change. And let's not forget Latin America and its history of revolutions. Much of the world is a powder keg that can easily slip back into murderous ways. Our Pax Americana is imperfect, including its financial and military aspects, and harsher in the Mideast, but elsewhere it's been a catalyst for needed change if not a flowery renaissance. But as the crusaders discovered, if you go.out slaying dragons, you may come home with a lot of corpses. Easy change has never been easy.

And it can all slip away in a moment, just as the amazing opening and leap forward of tech and trade and human progress of the late 1800's gave way to rising nationalism and World War I & 2.

So far it's not so much about us. But it might be if we do the wrong thing. We have the luxury in calm peaceful times of thinking we're on the right track, that it doesn't matter, that we can do what we want. But that calm is deceptive. It can fall apart quickly, as 9/11 only hinted at and Rwanda & Congo atrocities illustrated in detail.

Be careful wishing for revolutions, even metaphorical. The real ones have been none too pleasant.