Conclusion

Abstract

As the Millennium comes within sight, the United States has never been as prosperous. The stock market index regularly breaks record highs, unemployment stands at a twenty-eight year low, exports are booming, while the fears of everlasting budget deficits have effectively been stilled. Yet for all that, almost two-thirds of Americans express the view that, compared to ten years ago, they are further away from the American dream. The fault, we contend, is inherent in structural exigencies rather than lying in the eyes of the beholder. For all their immense ingenuity and their capacity to surmount setbacks, Americans remain wedded to a value system parts of which, cherished as they may be, inhibit them from getting the best out of ongoing trends. While the Internet traffic is doubling every hundred days, and while 62 million Americans are now using the worldwide network, the axiom of the ‘wide open spaces’ and the ‘melting pot’ still prevails. The impending next step in the informatics revolution, foreshadowed by Vice-President Gore in his April 1998 address, will be a giant leap forward, bringing the entire contents of the thirty-volume Encyclopedia Britannica on to one single hairbreadth part of a disc.

‘We are, after all, the world’s only superpower. We do have to lead the world.’ (President Clinton, April 1995)