 comics? Archie and his conceited rival Reggie battle for the affections of Betty and Veronica, and the two girls, though they are best friends, jockey for the attention of Archie, the affable ­all-­American boy. They have been at it for more than 60 years, and in the early days the basic situation wasn’t far removed from the experience of many Americans, especially in small towns. Indeed, cartoonist Bob Montana based the Archie characters on people he knew from his high school days during the 1930s in Haverhill, Massachusetts. Most romantic competition occurred within small groups of people who knew one another. The girl or guy would choose, perhaps the couple would marry and settle down, and often the loser ended up living down the street or across town. Romance was full of heartbreak and anxiety, but at least you knew who your rivals were and who was beating ­you.

Archie and his crowd continue their antics in the world of colored ink, but in the real world, romantic competition has radically changed. 

Millions of Women Are Waiting to Meet You

 is the apt title of Sean Thomas’s 2006 book about Internet dating, and there really are, just as millions of men are now potential matches for each woman. But the sad truth for members of both sexes is that millions of rivals are also waiting, waiting to undercut their chances and crush their hopes before they even get close to a first date. All they will “see” is that their charming e-mail to “prettyblonde47” or “bronc0451” was never answered. The competition now is invisible, the rivals ­faceless.

What’s true in the romantic sphere is also increasingly the case in the wider world. Most of the pressure on the wages and job security of American software programmers now comes from eager workers in India and Bangladesh. Hardly anyone saw this challenge coming. When those Bangladeshis were learning programming skills and clever ways to sell their services over the Internet, they never issued a challenge or threw down a gauntlet. And it is not just programmers, factory workers, and call center employees who face new challengers. Invisible competition now touches even those who make their living with paintbrushes and shovels. At Guru.com and other websites, it’s easy for anybody anywhere in the world to hire specialists overseas for a wide variety of services, from designing integrated circuits to composing advertising jingles. You can hire somebody to paint your portrait or to draw up a landscape design for your house. The upshot is this: Competition is fiercer than ever before, yet it is also harder to perceive as real. No rival with snarling teeth knocks on your ­door.

Any good horror-movie director knows that invisibility increases anxiety. We all want to turn on the light, identify the assailant, or understand the problem we are facing. If we cannot, we clutch at straws. We look for order, even when order cannot be found; this is a theme of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the best-selling books 

 (2005). As the concrete manifestations of the more important contests of love and business vanish, we recreate ­up-­close rivalry to make our lives feel more real. I suspect that this helps explain the growing appetite for televised sports and organized athletics for children as well as the vogue for reality TV series such as 

, eating contests, and even spelling bees. Because children are a cheap labor supply and willing to engage in all sorts of behavior for a chance at a prize or parental approval, they often serve as the vehicle for parents who seek to live out their desire for ­head-­to-­head competition vicariously. Spelling does not interest many people (who sits around practicing?), but bees exemplify the competitive spirit in action. The challenge to spell 

 will bring one kid to tears and another to ­triumph.

More significantly, anxiety about invisible competition also feeds the backlash against international trade. Economists are right to stress that the benefits of trade outweigh the costs, most of all to Bangladeshis but also to American consumers, yet an increasingly disquieted public demands more proof. A measure of reassurance can found by sorting through the winners and losers created by the new invisible competition brought by globalization.

But in the new arena, with its faceless and anonymous competitors, those who are driven to action mostly by adrenalin will not fare well.

Let’s look at individuals. Human beings evolved in small groups and hunter-gatherer societies, in which virtually all competition was face­-to-­face. That is the environment most of us are biologically and emotionally geared to succeed in, and it explains why our adrenalin surges when a rival wins the boss’s favor or flirts with our special someone. But in the new arena, with its faceless and anonymous competitors, those who are driven to action mostly by adrenalin will not fare well. If that’s what they need to get things done, they will become too passive and others will overtake them.

The greatest gains in this new world are likely to go to people who are methodical planners or who love the game for its own sake. Some people plot their competitive strategies far in advance. These ­planners—­be they crazy or just highly ­productive—­don’t need anyone breathing down their necks, and indeed they often work best alone or in small groups. Bill Gates is a classic example. Planners’ behavior may manifest itself in competitive forms, but their underlying psychology is often not very rivalrous at all. They are ordering their own realities, usually for their individual psychological reasons, rather than acting out of a desire to trounce the ­competition.

Early risers will also be favored. These people simply enjoy being first in line, or first to use a new idea. They build competitive advantages before anyone else has much chance to react. These are the people who fuel America’s laboratories and high-technology industries, among other sectors. Basketball coaches are scouting younger and younger talent, parents start preparing their kids for the Ivy League in kindergarten, and businesses are starting to worry about global warming that may be decades away. Planning horizons have never been longer. Especially when early risers are ­far­-sighted innovators, they often obsess over their own internal creative activities more than they do their rivals. Their delight in winning is more abstract than visceral.

Nervous personality types, and those who are prone to choking in public, may also catch a break. The nervous choker typically reacts negatively to an in-your-face situation, such as an expectant crowd, a strutting rival, or a public confrontation. One-time Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean was a star on the Internet, but in front of the cameras he lost his temper, and his shot at the White House. As more and more people find themselves able to minimize personal contact by working via the Internet, the smart but anxious set will move to a more level playing field. We are thus getting a great hitherto-underutilized re­source. On the Internet, to paraphrase a famous 

 cartoon, nobody knows you’re a ­geek.

Most of all, invisible competition favors people with imagination. It favors the new marketing idea, or the new design (think of Apple), rather than those who focus on squeezing out business costs in order to undercut rivals. Invisible competition favors people who can see a new future and want to get there first. Before Google, who knew that Web searching would be such a big deal—and so profitable?

George Shackle, the neglected Scottish economist, wrote in his 1973 book 

 that the entrepreneur imagines a future no one else sees. For Shackle, the entrepreneur is not just a trader, a manager, or an initiator of enterprise. The fundamental entrepreneurial activity is creative, and it occurs in the mind rather than the physical world. The creators of YouTube and Facebook did not require a new raw material or even a radically new programming technique; most of all they were blessed with the ability to imagine a new way to present material and connect people to one another. Their competitors, if that phrase can even be used, were the young potential entrepreneurs who might have hit upon similar ideas first, but didn't. These phantom rivals were not out in the public arena, promoting their corporations or thumping their chests and proclaiming grand plans. Rather they were quietly doodling away on their computers in scattered suburbs and cities, perhaps after finishing their homework for the ­evening.

Invisible competition also gives an edge to people who can manage and interpret their own feedback. In the past, if you lost a job to a person who was smarter than you or had a better line of patter, you could size up the winner and gauge where you fell short. Now you can’t always see who crossed the finish line ahead of you. The future will favor people like Madonna, the pop star and media icon who has successfully reinvented herself so many times because she has an uncanny sense of where popular culture is bound and how to get there ­first.

The world of blogs is a good example of how invisible competition works. A reader can choose from among millions of blogs, and in that sense all bloggers are competing against one another all the time. New blogs appear out of the blue, and, if they carve out the right niche, find the right voice, or fill a previously unperceived need, they steal audiences away from old blogs or render them irrelevant.

Because I am a blogger myself (at www.marginalrevolution.com), I know or have met a good number of top bloggers. Many of them are shy, and most of them do not come across as particularly competitive. They probably would not be very fierce if they were thrown into a wrestling ring or a tennis court, or even if they were asked to play a round of 

. The top bloggers don’t think too hard about how to pander to audiences; they focus on ­self-­realization and developing their own voices. Competition in the blogosphere favors the quirky loner who happens to have a knack for writing quickly and has something interesting to ­say.

The rise of invisible competition has implications for nations as well as individuals and corporations. For the United States, those implications are overwhelmingly positive. Although Americans fret endlessly about the invisible threat of outsourcing, the rest of the world often sees the United States as the deadliest source of invisible competition. From information technology to cutting-edge medical research to higher education, Americans have achieved exceptional results relatively quickly, before the rest of the world had much chance to ­respond.

While American culture glorifies the competitive spirit, Americans are good competitors in part because they don’t always need that last-minute adrenalin rush. They tend to value change and innovation for their own sake, and they imagine themselves to be pioneers. The idea of striking out into unknown territory to build a better world is deeply embedded in the national psyche. The Protestant ethic also lives on, expressed in a commitment not only to hard work but to the idea that we fulfill ourselves through our labors. This helps explain why, to the vexation and puzzlement of Europeans, millions of Americans prefer to stay at their jobs rather than take all of their allotted vacation ­time.

The nations most disadvantaged by invisible competition may be those that exist in proximity to a key rival. They risk focusing too narrowly on one challenge and getting used to the idea that competition takes a highly visible form. Transfixed by its rivalry with India, Pakistan may be oblivious to other concerns. A similar preoccupation makes it harder for many people in the Middle East to take a global ­perspective.

Invisible competition hurts some Americans, and its manifestations are not in every way flattering to American society, but nonetheless, it is more to be embraced than feared. We have already made the choice. For all the angst and disappointment that Match.com produces, it’s hard to imagine that many people would prefer to return to a world in which they had few other choices but to marry the boy or girl next door and had to live without such things as Japanese cars and French wines . And who would pull the plug on the Internet? Invisible competition has arrived with such force because 

Limiting competition in one sphere of life, moreover, often serves only to push it into another and often less salutary area. Men in prison inhabit perhaps the most controlled environment imaginable, with little opportunity to strive for the normal rewards of life. Yet it is hard to think of a place where competition takes more destructive forms.

We tend to forget that competition often breeds cooperation. What is the contest between Archie and Reggie for the attention of Veronica but a bid for an alliance, a cooperative relationship? Very often, cooperation is needed even before one can compete. In order to succeed in the global marketplace, corporations strive mightily to instill the cooperative spirit in their employees, training them, investing in a shared corporate identity, and working to keep up workplace morale. And as both businesses and individuals become more successful, they are brought into more numerous relationships with other firms and people that require coordination and collaboration. Managing these proliferating relationships has become a major preoccupation of American ­business.

We tend to forget that competition often breeds cooperation.

The same technologies that foster invisible competition also promote new kinds of social ties and cooperation. Through my blog I come into contact with strangers around the world, and some I eventually meet for interesting meals and conversations. Even before she started her freshman year of college this fall, my stepdaughter was trading instant messages with her future classmates, starting new friendships with people she had never seen. Of course, she might use Facebook to get a competitive edge in flirting with some guy; that just shows again how closely competition and cooperation are ­intertwined.

Still, it is important to anticipate who will be hurt and how they might be helped in the world that lies before us. Awareness alone will not solve the basic problem. Maybe it would help if teenagers were told that their exams would be graded on a ­curve—­a curve determined mostly by test takers on another continent. Or if they were shown videos of Puerto Rico and Lithuania beating Team USA at basketball in the 2004 Summer Olympics. Realistically, however, such efforts can only go so ­far.

What we really need is better competition, in which no one party carries off all the spoils. But to get better competition, we usually end up looking to 

 competition. If one rival reaps all or most of the gains, that winner probably wasn't facing enough of a challenge from others. ­Coca-­Cola can charge higher prices and earn bigger profits if Pepsi is not in the market. If we wish to make sure a winner doesn't dominate a field, we need to bring in more competing parties. When Snapple and others join the fray, just about everyone gets a better deal, except, of course, Coca-­Cola.

In other words, we need even more invisible competition, despite all the fears and social peculiarities that entails. We need to learn to live with our fears, because they’re not going to go away anytime soon. If you’re feeling down about that prospect, the flip side is that we will get more and better cooperation. Match.com claims that more than 200,000 people each year meet the person they were looking for by using its service. Might this number be inflated? Maybe. Should you invest in getting a really spiffy photo on your profile? For ­sure.

Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting and Motivate Your Dentist

, is a professor of economics at George Mason University. 

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In our globalized economy, competitors can suddenly appear out of nowhere — if we can see them at all. The new environment spells trouble for some people, opportunity for others. 

The New Invisible Competitors

Microcredit has star power. In 2006, the Nobel Committee called it “an important liberating force” and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Muhammad Yunus, the “godfather of microcredit.” The actress Natalie Portman is a believer too; she advocates support for the Village Banking Campaign on its MySpace page. The end of poverty is “just a mouse click away,” she promises. A button on the site swiftly redirects you to paypal.com, where you can make a contribution to microcredit ­initiatives.

After decades of failure, the world’s aid organizations seem to think they have at last found a winning idea. The United Nations declared 2005 the “International Year of Microcredit.” Secretary-General Kofi Annan declared that providing microloans to help poor people launch small businesses recognizes that they “are the solution, not the problem. It is a way to build on their ideas, energy, and vision. It is a way to grow productive enterprises, and so allow communities to prosper.”

Many investors agree. Hundreds of millions of dollars are flowing into microfinance from international financial institutions, foundations, governments, and, most important, private ­investors—­who increasingly see microfinance as a potentially profitable business venture. Private investment through special “microfinance investment vehicles” alone nearly doubled in 2005, from $513 million to $981 ­million.

On the charitable side, part of microcredit’s appeal lies in the fact that the lending institutions can fund themselves once they are launched. Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, explains that you can begin by investing $60 billion in the world’s poorest people, “and then you’re done!”

But can microcredit achieve the massive changes its proponents claim? Is it the solution to poverty in the developing world, or something more ­modest—­a way to empower the poor, particularly poor women, with some control over their lives and their ­assets?

On trips to Africa and India we have talked to lenders, borrowers, and other poor people to try to understand the role microcredit plays in their lives. We met people like Stadile Menthe in Botswana. Menthe is, in many ways, the classic borrower. A single mother with little formal education, she borrowed money to expand the small grocery store she runs on a dusty road on the outskirts of Botswana’s capital city, Gaborone. Menthe’s store has done well, and she has expanded into the lucrative business of selling phone cards. In fact, she’s been successful enough that she has built two rental homes next to her store. She has diversified her income and made a better life for herself and her daughter. But how many borrowers are like Menthe? In our judgment, she is the exception, not the norm. Yes, microcredit is mostly a good thing. Very often it helps keep borrowers from even greater catastrophes, but only rarely does it enable them to climb out of ­poverty.

There's a puzzle at the heart of microcredit: How can people in new businesses growing at 20 percent annually afford to pay interest rates as high as 100 percent?

The modern story of microcredit began 30 years ago, when ­Yunus—­then an economics professor at Chittagong University in southeastern ­Bangladesh—­set out to apply his theories to improving the lives of the poor in the nearby village of Jobra. He began in 1976 by lending $27 to a group of 42 villagers, who used the money to develop informal businesses, such as making soap or weaving baskets to sell at the local market. After the success of the first experiment, Yunus founded Gram­een Bank. Today, the bank claims more than five million “members” and a loan repayment rate of 98 percent. It has lent out some $6.5 ­billion.

At the outset, Yunus set a goal that half of the borrowers would be women. He explained, “The banking system not only rejects poor people, it rejects women.... Not even one percent of their borrowers are women.” He soon discovered that women were good credit risks, and good at managing family finances. Today, more than 95 percent of Grameen Bank’s borrowers are women. The UN estimates that women make up 76 percent of microcredit customers around the world, varying from nearly 90 percent in Asia to less than a third in the Middle East.

While 70 percent of microcredit borrowers are in Asia, the institution has spread around the world; Latin America and ­sub-­Saharan Africa account for 14 and 10 percent of the number of borrowers, respectively. Some of the biggest microfinance institutions include Grameen Bank, ACCION International, and Pro Mujer of ­Bolivia.

The average loan size varies, usually in proportion to the income level of the home country. In Rwanda, a typical loan might be $50 to $200; in Romania, it is more likely to be $2,500 to $5,000. Often there is no explicit collateral. Instead, the banks lend to small groups of about five people, relying on peer pressure for repayment. At mandatory weekly meetings, if one borrower cannot make her payment, the rest of the group must come up with the cash.

The achievements of microcredit, however, are not quite what they seem. There is, for example, a puzzling fact at the heart of the enterprise. Most microcredit banks charge interest rates of 50 to 100 percent on an annualized basis (loans, typically, must be paid off within weeks or months). That’s not as scandalous as it ­sounds—­local moneylenders demand much higher rates. The puzzle is a matter of basic economics: How can people in new businesses growing at perhaps 20 percent annually afford to pay interest at rates as high as 100 ­percent?

The answer is that, for the most part, they can’t. By and large, the loans serve more modest ­ends—­laudable, but not world changing.

Microcredit does not always lead to the creation of small businesses. Many micro­lenders refuse to lend money for start-ups; they insist that a business already be in place. This suggests that the business was sustainable to begin with, without a microloan. Sometimes lenders help businesses to grow, but often what they really finance is spending and consumption.

That is not to say that the poor are out shopping for jewelry and fancy clothes. In Hyderabad, India, as in many other places, we saw that loans are often used to pay for a child’s doctor visit. In the Tanzanian capital of Dar es Salaam, Joel Mwakitalu, who runs the Small Enterprise Foundation, a local microlender, told us that 60 percent of his loans are used to send kids to school; 40 percent are for investments. A study of microcredit in Indonesia found that 30 percent of the borrowed money was spent on some form of ­consumption.

Sometimes consumption and investment are one and the same, such as when parents send their children to school. Indian borrowers often buy mopeds and ­motorbikes—they are ­fun to ride but also a way of getting to work. Cell phones are used to call friends but also to run ­businesses.

For better or worse, microborrowing often entails a kind of ­bait ­and ­switch. The borrower claims that the money is for a business, but uses it for other purposes. In effect, the cash allows a poor entrepreneur to maintain her business without having to sacrifice the life or education of her child. In that sense, the money is for the business, but most of all it is for the child. Such ­life­saving uses for the funds are obviously desirable, but it is also a sad reality that many microcredit loans help borrowers to survive or tread water more than they help them get ahead. This sounds unglamorous and even disappointing, but the ­alternative—­such as no doctor’s visit for a child or no school for a ­year—­is much ­worse.

Commentators often seem to assume that the experience of borrowing and lending is completely new for the poor. But moneylenders have offered money to the world’s poor for millennia, albeit at extortionate rates of interest. A typical moneylender is a single individual, ­well-­known in his neighborhood or village, who borrows money from his wealthier connections and in turn lends those funds to individuals in need, typically people he knows personally. But that personal connection is rarely good for a break; a moneylender may charge 200 to 400 percent interest on an annualized basis. He will insist on collateral (a television, for instance), and resort to intimidation and sometimes violence if he is not repaid on time. The moneylender operates informally, off the books, and usually outside the ­law.

So compared to the alternative, microcredit is often a very good deal indeed. Microcredit critics often miss this point. For instance, Aneel Karnani, who teaches at the University of Michigan’s business school, argues that microfinance “misses its mark.” Karnani says that in some cases microcredit can make life for the planet’s bottom billion even worse by reducing their cash flow. Karnani cites the high interest rates that microlenders charge and points out that “if poor clients cannot earn a greater return on their investment than the interest they must pay, they will become poorer as a result of microcredit, not wealthier.” But the real question has never been credit vs. no credit; rather, it is moneylender vs. modern microcredit. Credit can bring some problems, but microcredit is easing debt burdens more than it is increasing ­them.

If your saving are invested in a cow, relatives can't ask for a small piece of it.

At microlender SERO Lease and Finance in Tanzania, borrower Margaret Makingi Marwa told us that she prefers working with a microfinance institution to working with a moneylender. Moneylenders demand quick repayment at high interest rates. At SERO, Marwa can take six months or a year to pay off her lease contract. Given that her income can vary and that she may not have money at hand every month, she prefers to have a longer-term ­loan.

Moneylenders do offer some advantages, especially in rural areas. Most important, they come up with cash on the spot. If your child needs to go to the doctor right now, the moneylender is usually only a short walk away. Even under the best of circumstances, a microcredit loan can take several days to process, and the recipient will be required to deal with many documents, not to mention weekly ­meetings.

There is, however, an upside to this “bureaucracy.” In reality, it is the moneylender who is the “micro” operator. Microcredit is a more formal, institutionalized business relationship. It represents a move up toward a larger scale of trade and business organization. Microcredit borrowers gain valuable experience in working within a formal institution. They learn what to expect from lenders and fellow borrowers, and they learn what is expected of themselves. This experience will be a help should they ever graduate to commercial credit or have other dealings with the formal financial ­world.

The comparison to moneylending brings up another important feature of microcredit. Though its users avoid the kind of intimidation employed by moneylenders, microcredit could not work without similar incentives. The lender does not demand collateral, but if you can’t pay your share of the group loan, your fellow borrowers will come and take your TV. That enforcement process can lead to abuses, but it is a gentler form of intimidation than is exercised by the moneylender. If nothing else, the group members know that at the next meeting any one of them might be the one unable to repay her share of the ­loan.

If borrowers are using microcredit for consumption and not only to improve a small business, how do they repay? Most borrowers are ­self-­employed and work in the informal sector of the economy. Their incomes are often erratic; small, unexpected expenses can make repayment impossible in any given week or month. In the countryside, farmers have seasonal incomes and little cash for long periods of ­time.

Borrowers manage, at least in part, by relying on family members and friends to help out. In some cases, the help comes in the form of remittances from abroad. Remittances that cross national borders now total more than $300 billion yearly. A recent study in Tanzania found that microcredit borrowers get 34 percent of their income from friends and family, some of whom live abroad, but others of whom live in the city and have jobs in the formal sector. That’s the most effective kind of foreign aid, targeted directly at the poor and provided by those who understand their ­needs.

Here again, microcredit does something that traditional banks do not. A commercial bank typically will not lend to people who work in the informal sector, precisely because their erratic incomes make them risky bets. The loan officer at a commercial bank does not care that your brother in Doha is sending money each month to help you out. But a microcredit institution cares only that you come to your weekly meeting with a small sum in hand for repayment. Because of microcredit, families can leverage one person’s ability to find work elsewhere to benefit the entire ­group.

Sometimes microcredit leads to more savings rather than more debt. That sounds paradoxical, but borrowing in one asset can be a path toward (more efficient) saving in other ­assets.

To better understand this puzzle, we must set aside some of our preconceptions about how saving operates in poor countries, most of all in rural areas. Westerners typically save in the form of money or ­money-­denominated assets such as stocks and bonds. But in poor communities, money is often an ineffective medium for savings; if you want to know how much net saving is going on, don’t look at money. Banks may be a ­day­long bus ride away or may be plagued, as in Ghana, by fraud. A cash hoard kept at home can be lost, stolen, taken by the taxman, damaged by floods, or even eaten by rats. It creates other kinds of problems as well. Needy friends and relatives knock on the door and ask for aid. In small communities it is often very hard, even impossible, to say no, especially if you have the cash on ­hand.

People who have even extremely modest wealth are also asked to perform more community service, or to pay more to finance community rituals and festivals. In rural Guerrero State, in Mexico, for example, one of us (Cowen) found that most people who saved cash did not manage to hold on to it for more than a few weeks or even days. A dollar saved translates into perhaps a quarter of that wealth kept. It is as if cash savings faces an implicit “tax rate” of 75 ­percent.

Under these kinds of conditions, a cow (or a goat or pig) is a much better medium for saving. It is sturdier than paper money. Friends and relatives can’t ask for small pieces of it. If you own a cow, it yields milk, it can plow the fields, it produces dung that can be used as fuel or fertilizer, and in a pinch it can be slaughtered and turned into saleable ­meat or simply eaten. With a small loan, people in rural areas can buy that cow and use cash that might otherwise be diverted to less useful purposes to pay back the microcredit institution. So even when microcredit looks like indebtedness, savings are going up rather than down.

 making people’s lives better around the world. But for the most part, it is not pulling them out of poverty. It is hard to find entrepreneurs who start with these tiny loans and graduate to run commercial empires. Bang­la­desh, where Gram­een Bank was born, is still a desperately poor country. The more modest truth is that microcredit may help some people, perhaps earning $2 a day, to earn something like $2.50 a day. That may not sound dramatic, but when you are earning $2 a day it is a big step forward. And progress is not the natural state of humankind; microcredit is important even when it does nothing more than stave off decline.

With microcredit, life becomes more bearable and easier to manage. The improvements may not show up as an explicit return on investment, but the benefits are very real. If a poor family is able to keep a child in school, send someone to a clinic, or build up more secure savings, its ­well-­being improves, if only marginally. This is a big part of the reason why poor people are demanding greater access to microcredit loans. And microcredit, unlike many charitable services, is capable of paying for ­itself—­which explains why the private sector is increasingly involved. The future of microcredit lies in the commercial sector, not in unsustainable aid programs. Count this as another ­benefit.

If this portrait sounds a little underwhelming, don’t blame microcredit. The real issue is that we so often underestimate the severity and inertia of global poverty. Natalie Portman may not be right when she says that an end to poverty is “just a mouse click away,” but she’s right to be supportive of a tool that helps soften some of poverty’s worst blows for many millions of desperate ­people.

 is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University and author of

 Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist.

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It’s wishful thinking to believe that tiny loans to people in developing countries can end poverty, but microcredit does improve the lives of millions in small but meaningful ways.

The Micromagic of Microcredit

The United States has millions of homes in foreclosure, high unemployment rates, a failing General Motors, numerous insolvent banks, and unprecedented deficits. It is possibly on the brink of a second Great Depression. Yet the U.S. dollar has experienced one of its most rapid appreciations in history. Last summer, when it took about $1.66 to buy a euro, American tourists in Paris gasped at the price of a Coke. Now, a stronger dollar means that a euro can be had for something like $­1.26.

America’s relative decline in global affairs has been foretold many times, but it never quite seems to happen. Today, the rest of the world is looking to the United States to pull it out of a recession (or depression), even though many countries also blame us for having started it. The truth is this: The worse things go for the world as a whole, the more the United States gains in relative power and influence. Maybe that sounds counterintuitive, but it has happened before. After the first and second world wars left many other parts of the world in devastation, the United States rose in relative stature. It fell in standing, at least arguably, during the years between 1989 and 2007, when the world as a whole was enjoying unprecedented prosperity and ­liberty.

In the terminology of financial economics, the United States is, relatively speaking, a countercyclical asset. It’s not that America profits from bad times or war but that we have a relatively greater capacity to limit our losses and eventually bounce back. We are “built to fail,” so to ­speak.

Its size is one reason why the United States has such a robust polity and economy. In bad times, international cooperation tends to break down, which increases the relative influence of larger economic and political units. Smaller countries, such as Belgium, are generally more dependent on international trade than the United States. And in truly dire situations, military power counts for more—and the United States accounts for almost half of the world’s defense spending. Even when military power is not wielded directly, it is understood that America cannot be intimidated ­easily.

The United States also has a more favorable demographic position than many other nations. The populations of Japan and many European countries may be cut in half over the next 30 or 40 years, mostly because families in those places, if they form at all, have fewer children. China, with its ­one-­child policy, is in one of the toughest positions of any country. If nothing changes, the unimaginable will happen, and within a few decades China’s population will begin a rapid decline. The United States is not expected to shrink in population, in part because its immigrants are having children at relatively high ­rates.

Finally, while Europeans and Asians commonly think of the United States as a kind of “baby state,” in reality we have one of the oldest and most durable nation-states. With the possible exception of the Civil War period, the United States has a continuous and consistent governmental history running back to 1789 or, by some accounts, to the colonial governments of the 17th century. American political and economic institutions have been ­time-­tested in a way that few other countries can claim. If you doubt this, compare America’s multicentury record with the discontinuous and tumultuous political history of France, China, or ­Russia.

Amid the flood of alarming commentary, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the financial crisis has underscored the continuing strength of American global influence. Although the United States has been the epicenter of some of the economic problems, it has exhibited enviable economic and political stability, at least compared with Ireland, Spain, and most of Asia, to name just a few examples. The dollar’s appeal as one of the world’s safe havens has been redoubled by the recognition that the flexibility of the U.S. economy gives it a greater capacity than many others to adapt to ­shocks.

Americans talk about institutions that are "too big to fail." In parts of Europe, it's more apt to speak of those "too big to be saved".

It has become increasingly clear that the problems in European governance are ­severe—­and I am referring to the wealthier nations, not Bosnia and Albania. The European nations are tied to each other through the European Union and the euro, but they don’t have a good method for making collective decisions in contentious ­times.

Consider Germany. In January, its industrial production plummeted at an annualized rate of about 7.5 percent. Could Germany now be the financial savior of Europe? When Germany joined the Eurozone, the 16-nation bloc that embraces the euro as its sole currency, the country’s politicians promised voters that they would never have to pay for the profligate policies of the “less responsible” member nations. And for almost 20 years, Germans have been paying higher taxes to reconstruct eastern Germany and ease the transition from communism. It’s not a citizenry looking to fund more bailouts, especially in a major ­recession.

But now German citizens are told that they may have to bail out the Austrian banking system and possibly the government of Ireland, while paying additional subsidies to Hungary and perhaps to other eastern European nations as well. Further down the line, Spain, Italy, and Greece, which have all lost their premier AAA credit rating, may require some form of financial aid. The Germans might look to spread this burden around Europe, but there are few places to turn. France and the Netherlands could chip in, but the hat cannot be passed very widely. The United Kingdom had one of Europe’s leading economies, but now it is one of the most financially vulnerable na­tions. You can think of London as a large hedge fund based on Europe, specializing in speculative financing of major European projects. After finance, the two next-biggest British exports—pharmaceuticals and ­tourism—­are solid but hardly economically ­impressive.

Part of the problem for Europe is that its biggest banks are very large relative to the economies of their host nations—in other words, its component national economies are too small. The major Austrian banks, for instance, have loans to eastern Europe equal to as much as 70 percent of their country’s gross domestic product. The two largest Swiss banks, taken together, have assets four times larger than Switzerland’s GDP. Even in the relatively large economy of Germany, the liabilities of Deutsche Bank have been measured at 80 percent of German GDP. These banks have grown too large to be handled or bailed out by their national governments. In the United States we talk about institutions that are “too big to fail,” but in many parts of Europe it might be more apt to speak of those “too big to be saved.”

In the United States, with its relatively unified system of governance, the Federal Reserve can simply print money to fund bailouts, and even if that is an ugly alternative, the government’s ability to act underpins the credibility of the system as a whole. The European Central Bank (ECB) is explicitly banned from creating more euros for the purpose of bailing out national banks. The Swiss central bank could print money for financial bailouts, but the prospect of the resulting inflation and rapid depreciation of the Swiss franc makes this a very unappealing choice, especially for a country that has marketed itself as a haven of financial solidity. And a weaker franc would only make it harder for Switzerland’s big banks to meet their obligations, many of which they must pay in other ­currencies.

Ideally, the ECB should take on a stronger role as lender of last resort in Europe, but the EU does not make such decisions easily. Fundamental alterations would be needed in the bank’s charter, which was written precisely to make change very difficult, in part because Germany, with its historically rooted dread of inflation, insisted on biasing the ECB toward conservatism and inaction. Even if the bank’s charter were amended, the member countries would surely impede any action by bickering over who would pay the bills for new initiatives. If the ECB is going to run bailouts, ­decision ­making will have to become a lot more fluid, and that would require Germany to give up control and the bank to move away from price stability as its sole objective. Since the EU member states have not been able to agree on a reform of the Union constitution, it’s not obvious they will be able to agree on changing the bank’s charter. They’ve had ­time—­and good ­reason—­to do so, yet have taken no serious action.

It’s not impossible that the ECB could at some point simply assume emergency powers and run a ­bail­out on very short notice and without legal authorization. Recall that the Bear Stearns and AIG emergency deals were done by the Fed over weekends. At that point the question would be whether other EU procedural safeguards would maintain their credibility, or whether skeptics within the EU, such as Denmark, would feel that their precious veto rights were no longer being ­protected.

The relatively weak nature of the ECB reflects some of the problems of coordinating the actions of a number of smaller countries in difficult times. In the United States, coordination between the Fed and the Treasury Department is taken for granted, and Congress is usually willing to back up those institutions. The Troubled Assets Relief Program bailouts passed in 2008 not because Congress thought they were a good idea, but because Treasury secretary Henry Paulson and Fed chairman Ben Bernanke told the legislators that they had better sign on or the sky would fall. This sort of bossiness won’t solve every problem, but the European nations have no comparable process, and no comparable centralized power base capable of responding quickly and effectively to crises. In the final analysis, no one knows who is responsible for the European economies. If the Chinese are investing in the United States and they have a concern, they can pick up the phone and call Bernanke or the current Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, and receive a consistent answer, backed by a single national executive, a single legislature, and, ultimately, the world’s most powerful military. You could say that when it comes to major foreign investors, the United States has a better “customer service department” (we at home call them politicians) than Europe or, for that matter, ­Asia.

It’s not widely recognized that Europe, because of its systemic weaknesses, already has required implicit bailouts by the United States. European financial institutions are prominent on the list of the ­bailed-­out creditors of AIG, the insurance company that, in effect, was nationalized by the Fed in 2008. Few U.S. financial regulators wish to stress this point, but one reason why the Fed rescued AIG was that it knew that European regulators could not handle the fallout from an AIG ­collapse.

It’s commonly claimed that the economic future of the world lies in Asia, but that vision too has taken a beating lately. The ­export-­based economies of Japan and Taiwan are contracting more rapidly than those of the United States and Europe. The two countries have not suffered banking crises, but their economies are dependent upon the expectation that global consumers will have more money to spend every year. Their economies are in this manner implicitly leveraged—arguably, more leveraged than the U.S. ­economy—­even apart from whatever explicit levels of debt they hold. The value of Japanese and Taiwanese commercial investments depends on the ability of customers overseas to continue borrowing and spending ­money—­and that doesn’t look like a very good bet right ­now.

One of the most important economic questions is what will happen with China. The Great Depression of the 1930s came to China last, and that pattern could be repeated today. So far, the country’s economic growth rate has dropped from 12 or 13 percent annually to a measured rate of about six percent. But given that there are doubts about the honesty of the Chinese government in reporting economic data, the true growth rate may be much lower than that. In any case, the Chinese real estate boom has ended, and massive layoffs are occurring in the export sector. Chinese financial and commercial enterprises are not very transparent, ­double-­digit growth allowed many unsound or speculative enterprises to stay afloat (“The recession reveals what the auditor missed” is one version of an old saying), and the economic expectations of the Chinese citizenry have become high. The nation’s leaders fear social unrest. No one knows if Chinese economic and political institutions will hold together in tougher ­times.

On the positive side, China has the luxury of high savings rates and an immense stock of accumulated foreign assets, especially U.S. government securities. If China survives the current crisis more or less intact, like the United States it will emerge as a large nation with its status and influence ­enhanced.

In the long run, the fortunes of nations depend on many factors, not just their response to a single financial crisis. Nonetheless, such reactions reflect strengths and weaknesses that show up in other areas of economic and social policy. Despite the separation of powers built into the American political system, U.S. political institutions have, by global standards, proven themselves unusually decisive and effective at critical times. The ability to react swiftly to new challenges is an underlying theme in American history, whether we consider the early missions to the moon, the breakthroughs of the ­civil ­rights movement, the pioneering of environmental regulation, or the ­pro-­market Reagan reforms of the ­1980s.

It’s a paradox that it’s the large, diverse nations such as the United States that have the greatest ability to maneuver in a crisis and turn on the proverbial dime. That’s good for us, of course, but if a new American Century is about to be born, it’s another sign that the world faces very serious challenges. And that’s not a cause for anyone to ­cheer.

Board of Editorial Advisers with this issue, is a professor of economics at George Mason University, where he is director of the Mercatus Center. He is the author most recently of

 Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist (2007).

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It’s no cause for celebration, but the global financial crisis shows why the United States remains the indispensable nation.

Last Man Standing

The printed word is not dead. We are not about to see the demise of the novel or the shuttering of all the bookstores, and we won’t all end up on Twitter. But we are clearly in the midst of a cultural transformation. For today’s younger people, Google is more likely to provide a formative cultural experience than 

novels. There is no question that books are becoming less central to our cultural life.

The relative decline of the book is part of a broader shift toward short and to the point. Small cultural bits—written words, music, video—have never been easier to record, store, organize, and search, and thus they are a growing part of our enjoyment and education. The classic 1960s rock album has given way to the iTunes single. On YouTube, the most popular videos are usually just a few minutes long, and even then viewers may not watch them through to the end. At the extreme, there are Web sites offering five-word movie and song reviews, six-word memoirs (“Not Quite What I Was Planning”), seven-word wine reviews, and 50-word minisagas.*

The new brevity has many virtues. One appeal of following blogs is the expectation of receiving a new reward (and finishing off that reward) every day. Blogs feature everything from expert commentary on politics or graphic design to reviews of new Cuban music CDs to casual ruminations on feeding one’s cat. Whatever the subject, the content is replenished on a periodic basis, much as 19th-century novels were often delivered in installments, but at a faster pace and with far more authors and topics to choose from. In the realm of culture, a lot of our enjoyment has always come from the opening and unwrapping of each gift. Thanks to today’s hypercurrent online environment, this is a pleasure we can experience nearly constantly.

The relative decline of the book is part of a broader shift toward short and to the point. Small cultural bits—written words, music, video—have never been easier to record, store, organize, and search, and thus they are a growing part of our enjoyment and education.

It may seem as if we have entered a nightmarish attention-deficit culture, but the situation is not nearly as gloomy as you have been told. Our culture of the short bit is making human minds more rather than less powerful.

The arrival of virtually every new cultural medium has been greeted with the charge that it truncates attention spans and represents the beginning of cultural collapse—the novel (in the 18th century), the comic book, rock ‘n’ roll, television, and now the Web. In fact, there has never been a golden age of all-wise, all-attentive readers. But that’s not to say that nothing has changed. The mass migration of intellectual activity from print to the Web has brought one important development: We have begun paying more attention to information. Overall, that’s a big plus for the new world order.

It is easy to dismiss this cornucopia as information overload. We've all seen people scrolling with one hand through a BlackBerry while pecking out instant messages (IMs) on a laptop with the other and eyeing a television (I won’t say “watching”). But even though it is easy to see signs of overload in our busy lives, the reality is that most of us carefully regulate this massive inflow of information to create something uniquely suited to our particular interests and needs—a rich and highly personalized blend of cultural gleanings.

The word for this process is multitasking, but that makes it sound as if we’re all over the place. There is a deep coherence to how each of us pulls out a steady stream of information from disparate sources to feed our long-term interests. No matter how varied your topics of interest may appear to an outside observer, you’ll tailor an information stream related to the continuing “stories” you want in your life—say, Sichuan cooking, health care reform, Michael Jackson, and the stock market. With the help of the Web, you build broader intellectual narratives about the world. The apparent disorder of the information stream reflects not your incoherence but rather your depth and originality as an individual.

My own daily cultural harvest usually involves listening to music and reading—novels, nonfiction, and Web essays—with periodic glances at the New York Times Web site and an e-mail check every five minutes or so. Often I actively don’t want to pull apart these distinct activities and focus on them one at a time for extended periods. I like the blend I assemble for myself, and I like what I learn from it. To me (and probably no one else, but that is the point), the blend offers the ultimate in interest and suspense. Call me an addict, but if I am torn away from these stories for even a day, I am very keen to get back for the next “episode.”

Many critics charge that multitasking makes us less efficient. Researchers say that periodically checking your e-mail lowers your cognitive performance level to that of a drunk. If such claims were broadly correct, multitasking would pretty rapidly disappear simply because people would find that it didn't make sense to do it. Multitasking is flourishing, and so are we. There are plenty of lab experiments that show that distracting people reduces the capacity of their working memory and thus impairs their decision making. It’s much harder to show that multitasking, when it results from the choices and control of an individual, does anyone cognitive harm. Multitasking is not a distraction from our main activity, it is our main activity.

Consider the fact that IQ scores have been rising for decades, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. I won’t argue that multitasking is driving this improvement, but the Flynn effect does belie the common impression that people are getting dumber or less attentive. A harried multitasking society seems perfectly compatible with lots of innovation, lots of high achievers, and lots of high IQ scores.

With the help of technology, we are honing our ability to do many more things at once and do them faster. We access and absorb information more quickly than before, and, as a result, we often seem more impatient. If you use Google to look something up in 10 seconds rather than spend five minutes searching through an encyclopedia, that doesn't mean you are less patient. It means you are creating more time to focus on other matters. In fact, we’re devoting more effort than ever before to big-picture questions, from the nature of God to the best age for marrying and the future of the U.S. economy.

Our focus on cultural bits doesn't mean we are neglecting the larger picture. Rather, those bits are building-blocks for seeing and understanding larger trends and narratives. The typical Web user doesn't visit a gardening blog one day and a Manolo Blahnik shoes blog the next day, and never return to either. Most activity online, or at least the kind that persists, involves continuing investments in particular long-running narratives—about gardening, art, shoes, or whatever else engages us. There’s an alluring suspense to it. What’s next? That is why the Internet captures so much of our attention.

Consider the fact that IQ scores have been rising for decades, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. I won’t argue that multitasking is driving this improvement, but the Flynn effect does belie the common impression that people are getting dumber or less attentive.A harried multitasking society seems perfectly compatible with lots of innovation, lots of high achievers, and lots of high IQ scores.

Indeed, far from shortening our attention spans, the Web lengthens them by allowing us to follow the same story over many years’ time. If I want to know what’s new with the NBA free-agent market, the debate surrounding global warming, or the publication plans of Thomas Pynchon, Google quickly gets me to the most current information. Formerly I needed personal contacts—people who were directly involved in the action—to follow a story for years, but now I can do it quite easily.

Sometimes it does appear I am impatient. I’ll discard a half-read book that 20 years ago I might have finished. But once I put down the book, I will likely turn my attention to one of the long-running stories I follow online. I've been listening to the music of Paul McCartney for more than 30 years, for example, and if there is some new piece of music or development in his career, I see it first on the Internet. If our Web surfing is sometimes frantic or pulled in many directions, that is because we care so much about so many long-running stories. It could be said, a bit paradoxically, that we are impatient to return to our chosen programs of patience.

Another way the Web has affected the human attention span is by allowing greater specialization of knowledge. It has never been easier to wrap yourself up in a long-term intellectual project without at the same time losing touch with the world around you. Some critics don’t see this possibility, charging that the Web is destroying a shared cultural experience by enabling us to follow only the specialized stories that pique our individual interests. But there are also those who argue that the Web is doing just the opposite—that we dabble in an endless variety of topics but never commit to a deeper pursuit of a specific interest. These two criticisms contradict each other. The reality is that the Internet both aids in knowledge specialization and helps specialists keep in touch with general trends.

The key to developing your personal blend of all the “stuff” that’s out there is to use the right tools. The quantity of information coming our way has exploded, but so has the quality of our filters, including Google, blogs, and Twitter. As Internet analyst Clay Shirky points out, there is no information overload, only filter failure. If you wish, you can keep all the information almost entirely at bay and use Google or text a friend only when you need to know something. That’s not usually how it works. Many of us are cramming ourselves with Web experiences—videos, online chats, magazines—and also fielding a steady stream of incoming e-mails, text messages, and IMs. The resulting sense of time pressure is not a pathology; it is a reflection of the appeal and intensity of what we are doing. The Web allows you to enhance the meaning and importance of the cultural bits at your disposal; thus you want to grab more of them, and organize more of them, and you are willing to work hard at that task, even if it means you sometimes feel harried.

The key to developing your personal blend of all the “stuff” that’s out there is to use the right tools. The quantity of information coming our way has exploded, but so has the quality of our filters, including Google, blogs, and Twitter. As Internet analyst Clay Shirky points out, there is no information overload, only filter failure.

It’s true that many people on the Web are not looking for a cerebral experience, and younger people especially may lack the intellectual framework needed to integrate all the incoming bits into a meaningful whole. A lot of people are on the Web just to have fun or to achieve some pretty straightforward personal goals—they may want to know what happened to their former high school classmates or the history of the dachshund. “It’s still better than watching TV” is certainly a sufficient defense of these practices, but there is a deeper point: The Internet is supplementing and intensifying real life. The Web’s heralded interactivity not only furthers that process but opens up new possibilities for more discussion and debate. Anyone can find space on the Internet to rate a product, criticize an idea, or review a new movie or book.

One way to understand the emotional and intellectual satisfactions of the new world is by way of contrast. Consider Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. The music and libretto express a gamut of human emotions, from terror to humor to love to the sublime. With its ability to combine so much in a single work of art, the opera represents a great achievement of the Western canon. But, for all Don Giovanni’s virtues, it takes well over three hours to hear it in its entirety, perhaps four with an intermission. Plus, the libretto is in Italian. And if you want to see the performance live, a good seat can cost hundreds of dollars.

Instead of experiencing the emotional range of Don Giovanni in one long, expensive sitting, on the Web we pick the moods we want from disparate sources and assemble them ourselves. We take a joke from YouTube, a terrifying scene from a Japanese slasher movie, a melody from iTunes, and some images—perhaps our own digital photos—capturing the sublime beauty of the Grand Canyon. Even if no single bit looks very impressive to an outsider, to the creator of this assemblage it is a rich and varied inner experience. The new wonders we create are simply harder for outsiders to see than, say, the fantastic cathedrals of Old Europe.

The measure of cultural literacy today is not whether you can “read” all the symbols in a Rubens painting but whether you can operate an iPhone and other Web-related technologies. One thing you can do with such devices is visit any number of Web sites where you can see Rubens’s pictures and learn plenty about them. It’s not so much about having information as it is about knowing how to get it. Viewed in this light, today’s young people are very culturally literate indeed—in fact, they are very often cultural leaders and creators.

To better understand contemporary culture, consider an analogy to romance. Although many long-distance relationships survive, they are difficult to sustain. When you have to travel far to meet your beloved, you want to make every trip a grand and glorious occasion. Usually you don’t fly from one coast to another just to hang out and share downtime and small talk. You go out to eat and to the theater, you make passionate love, and you have intense conversations. You have a lot of thrills, but it’s hard to make it work because in the long run it’s casually spending time together and the routines of daily life that bind two people to each other. And of course, in a long-distance relationship, a lot of the time you’re not together at all. If you really love the other person you’re not consistently happy, even though your peak experiences may be amazing.

A long-distance relationship is, in emotional terms, a bit like culture in the time of Cervantes or Mozart. The costs of travel and access were high, at least compared to modern times. When you did arrive, the performance was often very exciting and indeed monumental. Sadly, the rest of the time you didn't have that much culture at all. Even books were expensive and hard to get. Compared to what is possible in modern life, you couldn't be as happy overall but your peak experiences could be extremely memorable, just as in the long-distance relationship.

The measure of cultural literacy today is not whether you can “read” all the symbols in a Rubens painting but whether you can operate an iPhone and other Web-related technologies. One thing you can do with such devices is visit any number of Web sites where you can see Rubens’s pictures and learn plenty about them.It’s not so much about having information as it is about knowing how to get it.

Now let’s consider how living together and marriage differ from a long-distance relationship. When you share a home, the costs of seeing each other are very low. Your partner is usually right there. Most days include no grand events, but you have lots of regular and predictable interactions, along with a kind of grittiness or even ugliness rarely seen in a long-distance relationship. There are dirty dishes in the sink, hedges to be trimmed, maybe diapers to be changed.

If you are happily married, or even somewhat happily married, your internal life will be very rich. You will take all those small events and, in your mind and in the mind of your spouse, weave them together in the form of a deeply satisfying narrative, dirty diapers and all. It won’t always look glorious on the outside, but the internal experience of such a marriage is better than what’s normally possible in a long-distance relationship.

The same logic applies to culture. The Internet and other technologies mean that our favorite creators, or at least their creations, are literally part of our daily lives. It is no longer a long-distance relationship. It is no longer hard to get books and other written material. Pictures, music, and video appear on command. Culture is there all the time, and you can receive more of it, pretty much whenever you want.

In short, our relationship to culture has become more like marriage in the sense that it now enters our lives in an established flow, creating a better and more regular daily state of mind. True, culture has in some ways become uglier, or at least it would appear so to the outside observer. But when it comes to how we actually live and feel, contemporary culture is more satisfying and contributes to the happiness of far more people. That is why the public devours new technologies that offer extreme and immediate access to information.

Many critics of contemporary life want our culture to remain like a long-distance relationship at a time when most of us are growing into something more mature. We assemble culture for ourselves, creating and committing ourselves to a fascinating brocade. Very often the paper-and-ink book is less central to this new endeavor; it’s just another cultural bit we consume along with many others. But we are better off for this change, a change that is filling our daily lives with beauty, suspense, and learning.

Or if you’d like the shorter version to post to your Twitter account (140 characters or less): “Smart people are doing wonderful things.”

*Not everything is shorter and more to the point. The same modern wealth that encourages a proliferation of choices also enables very long performances and spectacles. In the German town of Halberstadt, a specially built organ is playing the world’s longest concert ever, designed to clock in at 639 years. This is also the age of complete boxed sets, DVD collector’s editions, extended “director’s cut” versions of movies, and the eight- or sometimes even 10-year Ph.D. But while there is an increasing diversity of length, shorter is the trend. How many of us have an interest in hearing more than a brief excerpt from the world’s longest concert?

 board of editorial advisers, is a professor of economics at George Mason University. This essay is adapted from his new books, 

Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World

 and can be followed on Twitter @tylercowen.

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Welcome the new world with open arms — and open browsers. 