The sunshine state
I AM BY nature and upbringing a pessimist. As a boy in Glasgow, I was encouraged to expect the worst, on the principle that by doing so you'll never be disappointed and sometimes you may even be pleasantly surprised.
This is not the American way. Optimism is in the DNA of the U.S.A. Louis Armstrong epitomized the upbeat national mood in that wonderful song "On the Sunny Side of the Street":
If I never had a cent
I'd be rich as Rockefeller
Gold dust at my feet
On the sunny side of the street
Nowhere is that sunny side sunnier than in Miami. I went there last week and was dazzled. The place is more than booming. Red Ferraris and black Hummers line the boulevards of Coral Gables. The good times have returned to the Biltmore Hotel, that glorious masterpiece of Roaring '20s architecture.
Tourism, which is Miami's biggest business, has more than recovered from the shock of 9/11. Thanks to surging trade volume, both the port and the airport are thriving. Financial services are growing apace. Unemployment is low.
Pick up the Miami Herald and you find full-page advertisements with messages such as "Create Generational Wealth Through Real Estate" and "No money? It matters not. Bad credit? No problem. No education? So what. Over 65? There's still time to change your financial future." The sunny side of the street indeed.
Note too that Miami's prosperity is a triumph for free migration as well as free trade and the free market. The population of Miami-Dade County is 57% Latino, largely though by no means exclusively Cubans. Yet the contrast with shabby, down-at-heel Havana could scarcely be more stark.
Yet, if history is any guide, our present golden age of globalization is unlikely to endure. It could be ended by a geopolitical crisis. Or it could be ended by a gradual domestic backlash.
Should Americans -- and especially Miamians -- be less optimistic? Conventional wisdom has it that they should. Economists want them to save more. Environmentalists want them to consume less.
Well, be careful what you wish for.
For roughly a decade, the global economy has been propelled forward by the insatiable consumption of U.S. households. Consumption accounts for about 70% of the U.S. gross domestic product, and U.S. growth has recently accounted for more than half of global growth. The appetite of Americans for imported clothing and gadgets has been one of the engines of China's economic miracle.
