What's still exceptional about America: why the United States is undervalued.

• Author: Schramm, Carl

After months and months of being battered by financial calamities, it is useful to examine what remains exceptionally positive about the United States--not from a potentially selfish, national point of view, but from the perspective of the rest of the world.

In our view, America remains exceptional in three ways that continue to be of utmost importance to the ability of the rest of the world to thrive. The first is the development and use of technology.

That may seem like a surprising judgment given--that Japan is widely seen as the land of robots, Germany as the paradise of engineers, and India has become a global software programming power. At the same time, a lot of those Japanese robots are under-employed. German engineering firms keep painting themselves into the luxury corner of their markets. And India focuses on software precisely because its creaky infrastructure still has considerable difficulty in moving any of the hard stuff around.

This is not to say that we Americans brings basic science to the rest of the world the way Prometheus brought fire. And yet, if you want to see a place where folks regularly make up new gadgets that other people actually use, you probably want to start looking in the United States.

Whether it's new cell phone services, health procedures, housekeeping gadgets, or avionics, U.S. innovators keep spewing out new things. And the vast U.S. consumer market keeps ruthlessly culling them--until the survivors can compete anywhere.

That brings us to the second way in which the United States remains exceptional: American enterprise stands as an exception in the world. This judgment does not rely on any extravagant boasts about American creativity. Nor does it rely on puffery about U.S. levels of business competition--or the notion that the United States has cornered the global market on innovation or entrepreneurship. But it is hard to imagine a country that has more innovative entrepreneurs in more parts of the country, in more markets--and from more varied backgrounds.

In part, the success of U.S. innovators is a simple matter of supply rising to meet the demands of the increasingly maligned American consumer. Sure enough, we keep reading accounts of how this consumer--apparently fueled by a boozy mix of imaginary housing prices and delusional views of personal and national deficits--kept on buying and buying from the grim years of the dotcom implosion right through the discovery of terrorism in the western...