Bet on America

China's rivers are sewers. Environmental problems make the Chinese economic boom unsustainable. That's the recent assessment of China's deputy minister for the environment in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel: "This miracle will end soon because the environment can no longer keep pace. Acid rain is falling on one third of the Chinese territory, half of the water in our seven largest rivers is completely useless, while one fourth of our citizens does not have access to clean drinking water."

Moreover, China will be the first country to get old before it gets rich. China's one-child policy, so rigidly enforced in the 1980s and 1990s, will haunt the country as it finds itself without enough workers to support a geriatric population.

My colleague Joel Garreau recently surveyed global demographic trends for Smithsonian magazine and concluded that the United States is in far better shape than any potential rival. By 2020, there will be only one German worker for every German pensioner. Japan is rapidly aging and having few babies. Russia combines a low birthrate with decreasing life expectancy. Every year, 700,000 more Russians die than are born.

Scholars sometimes cite the GDP of the European Union as evidence that America will soon be matched on the world stage. But here's the headline: The European Union isn't a country! It's more like a confederation. The U.S. effort to unite disparate, sovereign states into a single political unity started two centuries ago. The Europeans right now are where we were back in the days of powdered wigs and pewter mugs. As the Harvard historian Niall Ferguson has written, "The EU lacks a common language, a common postal system, a common soccer team, even a standardized electric socket."

If you want to worry about our future, you could start with a side effect of American economic success: Our machine for wealth creation has also been a machine for income inequality. While more and more people live gilded lives, millions remain trapped in poverty. The question is: What kind of society are we trying to build? Surely not one where strip malls stretch to the horizon and countless kids disappear into role-playing games online. Geopolitical dominance doesn't guarantee that we'll have a country we can be proud of.

Technological success brings unexpected complications. A thousand years ago, it would have seemed like magic, this feat of taking rocks and liquids from the Earth, burning them and using the energy, transmitted via wires, to cool a house in the summer (also, people would have said, "What's a 'house'?"). Now we're paying a price for our ingenuity.

Scrambling the picture is the rise of transnational corporations and nongovernmental organizations. Globalization may make the nation-state increasingly irrelevant. Your intellectual community may have members on six or seven continents. "By traditional measures of hard power, compared to other nations, the United States will remain number one," predicts Harvard political scientist Joseph S. Nye Jr. in "The Paradox of American Power," "but being number one ain't gonna be what it used to."

Americans are blessed with a durable Constitution, cultural diversity, abundant resources and an open society. I think we're capable of solving our problems. That's the position, too, of Murphy, whose America/Rome meditation ends on a hopeful note. He writes that a fundamental characteristic of Americans is the belief that improvement is possible. Sure, we're making many of the mistakes the Romans made: "But the antidote is everywhere. The antidote is being American."

achenbachj@washpost.com

Joel Achenbach is a Washington Post staff writer and blogs

at washingtonpost.com/achenblog.