Tired of Super Bowl ads? Here's an interesting worldview of America

Tired of endless (and meaningless) speculation about Super Bowl ads and how they reflect America culture? Economist Barry Eichengreen lays out a few thoughts and a different worldview in his new tome Exorbitant Privilege. The dollar's role in the international scheme of all things money is changing, but is not doomed. Just different.

Economist Menize Chinn weighs in on Eichengreen's worldview on The Business Insider. According to Eichengreen: "... increases in efficiency can't be willed into existence; they have to be achieved. And in order to deliver an improvement in the U.S. trade balance, they have to be achieved faster than in countries with which we compete."

"Here the United states has some obvious strengths. It has large numbers of university- and industry-based scientists, many attracted from other countries. ... entrepreneurs and an agile venture capital industry ... flexible labor markets . . . abundance of fertile land . ...

"But much of the country's physical infrastructure is antiquated and difficult to modernize, partly by virtue of the fact that it is under the jurisdiction of a multitude of state and local governments or in private hands. Freight railways own much of the track used by Amtrak, for example.

"Contrast the difficulty of building a high-speed link between Beijing and Shanghai -- or for that matter with France's, Germany's, and Spain's high-speed trains. China plans to build as much as 8,000 miles of high-speed rail by 2020. In the United States, meanwhile, intercity rail service is now actually slower than in the 1940's. ... Were Dwight Eisenhower to come along today and propose building the interstate highway system, no doubt he would be accused of socialism."

Professor Eichengreen worries:
"... the United States is no longer the beneficiary of an increasingly well-educated labor force."
I think evidence supporting this last point is evident everywhere, including in political discourse.