*and don't let Rupert Murdoch buy all of your newspapers!*

Don't worry about Rupert. He's spent his life accumulating newspapers,
only to now discover that the world has changed and they are losing
money bigtime!

The author makes the mistake of thinking that your average American
was smart in the first place. Not so, for anyone who has been there,
knows its a land of contradictions. America is the most religious
of Western countries, hardly a sign of intelligence. The deep south
can be a fairly primitive place, quite different to the North.

America's strength is as a place of innovation and its not just
Americans involved. Silicon Valley attracts the best brains from
China, India, Australia, just about everywhere. Bring them together
with venture capital and the result is huge potential. Few other
places like this exist, anywhere on our planet.

Rupert got done over by a couple of university students, who
pioneered Google. Venture Capital backed them and the world has
become their oyster. So far he does not know yet how to deal with
the new reality.

That kind of innovation is America's strength, not the intelligence of
your average American.

Let's say that you went out in 1650s Britain to poll everyone's opinions on, say, the monarchy. Most of them wouldn't have been able to write, so you would have had to write them down. When you got to the Welsh and Scottish borders you would have to hire translators to convert what they told you into English. Up in the Highlands you would probably find a few people who had never even heard of the monarchy. But after four or five years you would have accumulated a goodly sample of opinions. And the vast majority of them would be mindless repetitions of the views of local authority figures. Just like today, but much worse. Which is why nobody in power ever bothered to listen to them back then.

But they're listening now. Because what HAS changed today is that the kind of people who were formerly kept quiet and out of sight are now participating; going online, sending emails, joining groups, writing comments, blogging, recording and videoing. And in the process they are getting smarter. In the fifteen years that I've been online there has been a slow but steady increase in the level of understanding and debate in most online fora. Given examples of reason and logic most people will learn from them and respond likewise (though there are always a few exceptions).

The world's not getting dumber; it's just that the underclass is getting louder -- and smarter.

Jon J.

You make a strong point on the modern day apprceiation of debate. Olde Endland would have had to put down revolts with likes of William Wallace. In China the Mandate from Heaven was every few centuries taken by peasant revolutions. So long as the People speak and Powers listen, it is good.

Why is it that whenever I ask a question online I never get an answer?

Repeat:

Does anyone know of a contemporary culture other than Chinese which values learning?

The decline of USA is inevitable

Afterall, the one time Anglo-Saxon majority, on whose values the wealth of the nation was built, are no longer the “majority”.

However, don’t expect it any time soon, the fall of the British Empire started when those upstart colonists took it to themselves to deny King George his taxes and dumped the tea into Boston harbor. Yet it took another 150 years for the British Empire to finally expire.

I would fully and reasonably expect the USA to present as a far more resilient society than the vestiges of a geographically fragmented colonial Empire.

"In our dreams, people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present eduction conventions of intellectual and character education fade from their minds, and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk.
We shall not try to make these people, or any of their children, into philosophers, or men of science. We have not to raise up from them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for great artists, painters, musicians nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen – of whom we have an ample supply.
The task is simple. We will organize children and teach them in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way."
– John D. Rockefeller General Education Board (1906)

Specifically - when devising the current US Education system, he also said he wanted a "Nation of Workers, not a Nation of Thinkers".

The world is now reaping the benefits of that philosophy.