Book: "The Post-American World," Fareed Zakaria

• “Hyperinflation is the worst economic malady that can befall a nation…It was no the Great Depression that brought the Nazis to power in Germany but rather hyperinflation, which destroyed the middle class by making its savings worthless.”
• “In Washington [D.C.,] new thinking about a new world is sorely lacking…both parties continue to speak in language entirely designed for a domestic audience with no concern for the poisonous effect it has everywhere else. American politicians constantly and promiscuously demand, label, santion,and condemn whole countries for myriad failings…We are the only country in the world to issue annual report cards on every other country’s behavior. Washington, D.C., has become a bubble, smug and out of touch with the world outside.”
• “Between 1350 and 1950 – six hundred years – GDP per capita remained roughly constant in China and India (hovering around $600 for China and $550 for India.) In the same period, Western European GDP per capita went from $662 to $4,594, a 594 percent increase.” (emphasis his)
• “The world we’re entering will look like Bollywood. It will be thoroughly modern – and thus powerfully shaped by the West – but it will also retain important elements of local culture…The real effect of globalization has been an efflorescence of the local and modern.”
• “Immigration also gives America a quality rare for a rich country – hunger and energy…[I]mmigrants have gone on to become the backbone of the American working class, and their children or grandchildren have entered the American mainstream. America has been able to tap this energy, manage diversity, assimilate newcomers, and move ahead economically. Ultimately, this is what sets the country apart from the experience of Britain and all other historical examples of great economic powers that grow fat and lazy and slip behind as they face the rise of leaner, hungrier nations.”
• “America is the only country in the world, other than Liberia and Myanmar, that is not on the metric system…The entire British government works aggressively to make London a global hub. Washington, by contrast, spends its time and energy thinking of ways to tax New York, so that it can send its revenues to the rest of the country.”
• “For most of the world, the Iraq War was not about Iraq. ‘What does Mexico or Chile care about who rules in Baghdad?’ Jorge Castaneda, the former foreign minister of Mexico, told me. ‘It was about how the world’s superpower wields its power. That’s something we all care deeply about.”
• “Some 13 percent of U.S. Muslims believe that suicide bombings can be justified. Too high, for sure, but the figure compares with 42 percent for French Muslims and 88 percent for Jordanians.”