Rise of the Rest
The Rise of the Rest is a term coined by Fareed Zakaria on the post-American world. It is not a world marked by American decline, but the rise of everybody else. The rise of China and India are the most obvious signs, but the Gulf countries are also remaking themselves beyond hydrocarbons, Africa is beginning to be distinguished into tier 1, 2 and 3 countries of promise etc.
We came up with a fun video to capture these changes in Oct 2008. You are very welcome to use this in anyway you want, please attribute, much appreciated! You can grab from youtube or a larger version from google video.
Of course, much has changed since Lehman Brother’s collapse. The current Great Reset shows that this is not an assured certainty. There is no independent rise of the rest without the continued health of the USA. But even from within a Chasm (more explanation on these terms in the Great Reset page), there will come a different rise of the rest. One not centered on export, but centered on restructured domestic economies and technological innovation.
Regions that have accumulated a depth and breadth of skills, capital, networks and wealth and that have thrived in an export-oriented world (read China, Korea, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Australia…) cannot be automatically assumed to transition into a Chasm world successfully. But who has managed to transition into a deep, well developed domestic market with technological innovation without going through the path of export dependence? Maybe Japan, and Japan is not exactly a convincing example. Does India bear extra watching in the Chasm world? In a new world centered around China (what my prof Thian Ser calls Chi-Asia to replace Chi-merica), what are the new flows? And how might a nation/society poise itself over the next two decades to grasp onto this? Which of us has ‘got religion’ that the days of US export dependence are truly over?
When it becomes clearer which way the world will trend in the coming months, I might update with a different ‘Rise of the Rest’. 
How was the “90% of the engineers of the world will be in Asia” number estimated? Is there a public external source that can be used to reestimate that number? Does that take into account the fact that auto mechanics and the like are counted as engineers in China?
Seriously curious.
Diego Navarro
August 19, 2009 at 1:56 am
Hi Diego,
That’s a good question. The original quote was made in 2004 I think by 1996 chemist Nobelist Richard Smalley who believes that “citizenship matters” and he liked to provoke US based audiences with extrapolations of the future scientific workforce based on current levels of Ph.D. production in the United States and Asia. His take-home message: “By 2010, 90% of all Ph.D. physical scientists and engineers in the world will be Asian, and half of them will be living in Asia.” Mr. Smalley’s message so impressed a chair of a task force of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology that the same forecast popped up in a draft report on the U.S. scientific workforce. Robert Herbolt, former chief operating officer at Microsoft, then stretched Smalley’s calculation even further by referring to a world of Ph.D. scientists that would soon be “90% … Asian, living in Asia.” Then he turned the prediction into a rallying cry for his domestic (USA) audience: “What can we do about this shift of talent to other countries? What can we do to stem the tide?”
So the context of the extrapolation made by Smalley, and then further propagated by Herbolt, was made to a US policy audience to invest in US-born science and technology capabilities. A bit alarmist yes I agree. There have been since some numbers from McKinsey (I think) that asks if those numbers represent quantity more than quality (which is your question above). I haven’t really dug around for another stat yet but maybe I’ll update it for a future video update.
Putting this aside, it’s still a good question to ask. Does citizenship really matter for a country’s edge in science and technology? How might it hurt, and not hurt, a country’s ability to determine its future?
Hope this helps.
Have a good day!
chorpharn
August 19, 2009 at 10:03 am