Soup And World Domination

Soup

Every year there is a local soup contest here, a contest that should receive much wider popularity. It's so much more civilised than many other contests and everyone benefits, tasting soups and learning what has gone into them. Each village in the region has its own contest and the winners from each, voted by the tasters at large, congregate later in Vaison La Romaine to decide the regional winner. I went along with friends to the contest in Mollans. I'd invited them for a meal and decided that rather than make a starter myself we would all go first to the soup contedt in the village. There were half a dozen on offer covering a range of tastes but my personal choices were a creamy chicken soup and a spicy Thai one. I haven't yet found out who won.

World Domination

This evening I xas referred by a friend to a book he said was titled «Who Rules The World ?» but I have been unable to find it. He said it was by a writer who was basically a Marxist but embraced some aspects of caoitalism via Confucianism. Don't ask. Nonetheless the very title provoked some questions in my mind, such as by what means do you rule the world (or at least become top dog)? We all know how it has been done in the past but how can it be done in the future?I have to admit that I don't particularly care and you might not either but the question is there to be answered ;

Answers from the past, which could just still be valid, are by war or economic domination; in the future intellectual domination (having more clever/skilled people than anyone else) or the opposite, having more uneducated people than anyone else might just do it. This last could support a powerful dictatorship or provide plentiful cannon fodder for a war.

Let's deal with war first, as it seems the least viable. Any future war, other than on a purely local scale which wouldn't secure world dominance, would ammost certainly involve nuclear weapons so thete is unlukely to be any viable winner. Cannon fodder would not be needed.

If we don't need an uneducated workforce in large quantity as cannon fodder why else could we need them? Well, they could support a dictatorship (even if only under duress) but both the USSR and China have demonstrated that that situation is not durable.

Economic dominance is still very possible; the question is how? A large what the Americans call «grunt» (uneducated) workforce won't do it, however poorly paid, as many developing countries have already demonstrated. Wealth is obviously needed for investment and most of that will have to be attracted from outside or internally generated; no individual or likely group of individuals would have enough, however rich they were in realistic terms. Neither does having rich natural resources hack it for long. To create wealth these have to be used and they are finite. Being cleverer looks like the best bet, in quantity as well as quality. If the skilled/qualified labour force is not too expensive, relative to other similar labour forces, then investment and wealth should be generated. It looks a winner to me.

So which countries have that? One of the largest, the USA doesn't. I well remember an American professor friend telling me that he despaired of America's future because his IT classes were full of Asians; American students preferred law or sociology. And America anyway, at the moment, seems to prefer grunts. I think China and India fit my criteria best, so I would bet on one of those. But it's just an idle bet; whoever dominates it is unikely to affect the rest of my life in a small French provincial village so I don't really care. As for a resurgent, globally influential Britain….………..it seems to be trying hard not to be and certainly isn't working on the necessary credentials.