AFTER THE EMPIRE

The dominant values in Europe---rather foreign these days to American society---are agnosticism, peace, and balance. . . American society, on the other hand, is the recent outcome of a highly successful colonial experience but one not tested by time—it developed over three centuries, thanks to the importation of literate workers to a world rich in minerals and other natural resources, and agriculturally productive, thanks to its virgin soil. America seems not to have understood that its success stems from a process of one-sided exploitation and expenditure of wealth that it did not create. . . America has always grown by playing out its soils, wasting its oil, and by looking abroad for the people it needed to do its work. . . The American system is no longer able to provide for its own population. . . Articles in the American business press that call for the modernization of the German and Japanese systems all have an unintended darkly comic side, since one might seriously wonder how the world economy would function if Germany and Japan began running up trade deficits on the scale of the United States [175 177 179f 180]

Emmanuel Todd, AFTER THE EMPIRE (Gallimard, 2002)