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Shifting the center
We often seem to take it for granted that the US is the global center of innovation, culture, finance and business.
We may assume that this will always be the case. However, the centers are currently moving away from us.
Before we illustrate this movement, we should first describe how a center is determined. Imagine the Earth as a globe with every country assigned a “weight” equal to the quantity being studied. For example, the economic center of gravity is based on the GDP (weight) of a country. The center is the point where the globe would balance if all those weights were placed at their geographic locations.
One graphic in this post shows how the economic center has changed from ancient times to recent times. The center started east of the Fertile Cresent, moved towards Rome, then Europe, then the US in the 20th century and more recently is moving towards China, India, and Southeast Asia.
Another graphic shows the shift in the center of the number of Catholics worldwide. Over the course of 2000 years, the center has shifted from the Middle East to Africa with a stop in Europe for several centuries.
The world’s cultural center has evolved from Greece to Rome to Florence to Paris and London to the US. With the advent of the Internet, the cultural center of gravity is being influenced by Seoul, Mumbai, Lagos, São Paulo, and Mexico City.
The bar chart shows the increase in the number of academic papers published in high impact journals such as Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the Association of Computing Machinery. There has been a remarkable growth in the number of papers published by Chinese scientists. It doesn’t take too much imagination to see the center beginning to shift away from the US/Europe.
The industrial center has moved from England (with the Industrial Revolution) towards the US in the 20th century. More recently China and India, Vietnam, Mexico, and Indonesia have become very significant industrial centers and the US dominance in manufacturing has diminished.
The innovation center has moved from being strongly influenced by ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt (writing, irrigation, mathematics, astronomy), to Greece, to Rome (engineering, law, roads, architecture), to China (paper, printing, compass, gunpowder), to the Islamic world (algebra, medicine, optics, astronomy), to Europe with the Renaissance, and the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, and to the US (computers, medicine, aerospace, and software). Recently the center of innovation has begun to move to Asia.
We assume that the US has the most significant impact, of any country, on the location of the centers of the most important aspects of modern life. There is no question that our impact today is massive and will remain significant for decades.
However, centers move over time and they are moving today. Our dominance is becoming less dominant.
Increasingly we have to share the stage.
