I have a love-hatred relationship to Mr. Ganesh and his "journalism" (#943544). When he talks about immaterial things like sports or makes life reflections he's pretty interesting -- when he talks about politics or the economy, run for the hills!
The other day I saw this wonderful title: "Where the West Still Wins."
"The decline of the west is a profound story. But so is the unevenness of that process: the survival of lots of pockets where very little has changed"
... and Ganesh finds a handful of areas in which an otherwise broken Western civilization still rules: football, aircraft, universities, luxury brands. ("But the lag is the point. Change is written about quite enough. The stickiness of things isn’t. Yes, in hard terms, the world has become post-western.")
It is hard to steel yourself for a de-westernised future when you are served in English, paying in dollars and one male in three goes about with “BELLINGHAM” and “5” on his perspiring back.
Airbus, Prada, Harvard: someone with a bear view of the west might dismiss these assets as vestigial, as hangovers, like the inherited silver of a déclassé family, bound to be frittered over time. They are protected for now by high barriers to entry, in the case of aviation, or by the prestige that attaches to countries that have been very rich for very long, in the case of fashion. All of this can be overcome.
In a while, perhaps these brands won't have the stellar/quality reputation they used to.
This was funny...
still just two cities, both western, can claim to contain almost all nationalities in meaningful numbers, all the arts at a world-class standard and the top end of almost all professions, from finance to bio-research. You have guessed the two already, which suggests that this isn’t a controversial judgment.
Can you guess which two??
Anyway, very nice column.
non-paywalled: https://archive.md/nxrKg