America will always be number one, won't it?

“TOKYO—Almost everything the Apple computer company sells these days comes with this memorable statement of origin: “Designed by Apple in California, Assembled in China.” The implication is obvious: a few brilliantly creative, latte-quaffing, hybrid-driving Americans did the real work, while low-skilled Chinese assembly workers, laboring in serf-like conditions and earning a few dollars a day, meekly did the rest.

Certainly that is how it looks to American globalists. Citing Apple’s iPod at a Virginia trade conference a few months ago, former U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow commented, “China gets to do what they do well: low-value manufacturing. America gets to do what we do well: return on intellectual capital. It’s good for both of us, but I would rather be on our end of that.” The “Designed in California” message has been presented in similarly triumphalist terms by the Cato Institute’s chief trade commentator Daniel Griswold.

Such talk panders to one of the most consequential illusions of contemporary American economic thought: the idea that by dint of its unique creativity alone, the United States can count on remaining the world economy’s top dog in perpetuity. Widely shared by intellectuals on both sides of the U.S. political divide, this assumption goes a long way toward explaining the electorate’s relative apathy in the face of the collapse of America’s erstwhile world-beating manufacturing sector.”