Author(s): Clyde Prestowitz

Current Affairs

From one of America's shrewdest economic trend-spotters, a wake-up call that prosperity is about to shift from the West to the East, and what can be done before it's too late By the beginning of this century it was already commonplace to speak of the US as a "hyperpower," to talk of its military, political, and economic clout as unprecedented in world history, and to assume that American dominance would continue at least throughout our lifetimes. It is conventional wisdom that America will have no serious rivals for at least a generation. But the American position is far more fragile and ephemeral than much of the world believes. In this eye-opening new book, Prestowitz reveals the powerful yet barely visible trends that are converging with the potential to turn the world upside down by ending the six-hundred-year run of Western domination of the world. These trends include the end of America's position as the world's premier place for invention and technological innovation; the sudden entrance of 2.5 billion people in India and China into the world's skilled job market; the role of the World Wide Web in permitting many formerly localized jobs to be done anywhere in the world; and How the West Was Lost is a clear-eyed and profoundly unsettling look at America's and the world's economic future, from an author with a history of predicting the important trends long before they become apparent to others.