Outward Bound

America may be turning inward, but thank goodness the rest of the world isn't too.

BY CHARLES KENNY | FEBRUARY 13, 2012

It is easy enough to blame the media or schools for American disengagement with the world. A number of commentators noted recently that Time and Newsweek vary their domestic and international cover stories, picking fluffy stories for U.S. readers over breaking news abroad. Clearly they have decided that articles about Glenn Beck, Thomas Edison, and anxiety are of more interest to magazine-rack browsers in the United States than the throes of the Arab Spring, the rise of China, or international asylum-seekers. In editors' defense, they're surely right, and it only reflects a broader disengagement of the media from international affairs. The Tyndall Report notes that for 2011, three international stories were among the top five in terms of network news coverage -- Libya, Egypt, and the Japanese quake. But total coverage of international news was still below the level of the early 1990s, and those top three stories (plus the British royal wedding and the Syrian uprising) accounted for half of all foreign coverage on the ABC, NBC, and CBS television networks. That doesn't leave much space for covering a banner year for African growth or progress toward global elimination of polio.

In fact, as a rule, the foreign news that is reported is about death, violence, and despair. "If it bleeds, it leads" holds for international news as much as local coverage -- it just takes a lot more pints of blood to get on the television if it isn't from American veins. An analysis by Boston University's Denis Wu looked at foreign news coverage in two weeks of 2003 on CNN and the New York Times print edition. It found 560 stories covering foreign affairs. Iraq alone accounted for one-quarter of all stories. Add in the rest of the Middle East and Afghanistan, and that climbs to 38 percent. China got 3 percent; Brazil got 1.6 percent. And if the news is focused on war and tragedy, perhaps it's unsurprising that few Americans realize the rest of the world is increasingly healthy, wealthy, peaceful, and educated. That's a shame, because all this health and wealth provide incredible opportunities for Americans -- not least to trade, invest, or travel abroad for education and health care.

And there's a lot of work for America to do out there. While U.S. exports have been climbing, 140 economies (out of 146 with export data from the World Bank in 2010) exported more than the United States when measured as a share of their GDPs. Only Nepal, Brazil, Haiti, Ethiopia, and Tonga did worse than the U.S. export share (13 percent of GDP), according to the World Bank. Afghanistan outdid the United States by 2 percentage points of GDP. And China's export share was more than twice as big, at 30 percent.

Or look at investment trends. According to World Bank data, in 2010 U.S. net outflows of foreign direct investment -- where American investors were taking a 10 percent or larger share of a foreign company -- amounted to 2.4 percent of U.S. GDP. Twenty economies were above it in that share -- compare Germany on 3.3 percent of GDP, Chile at 4.1 percent, or Singapore on 9.5 percent. Meanwhile, U.S. undergraduates overseas accounted for only 0.4 percent of the global total of people studying abroad for their tertiary education -- and nearly half of those brave enough to venture outside America's borders got only as far as Britain. That hardly counts as exotic in an era where Brits win half the Oscars and present the Golden Globes every year.

If there is a silver lining to this cloud of Americans' disengagement, it is that other countries aren't doing so badly. We have seen there are 20 economies with a higher share of GDP going to foreign direct investment that the United States, and 140 that are exporting more. These countries are reaping the gains of closer global engagement -- in terms of stronger economic performance and greater technology transfer. There's at least the hope that the closer economic ties will make them less likely to go to war, too. Americans benefit from being in that richer and more pacific world -- even if they could do even better by venturing out into it a little more often.

JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images

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Charles Kenny is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, a Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation, and author, most recently, of Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding and How We Can Improve the World Even More. "The Optimist," his column for ForeignPolicy.com runs weekly.

CAPITALZERO

11:53 PM ET

February 13, 2012

Anti-Catholic? I don't think so, but it was distracting.

Mr. Kenny, I found your article very informative, but it was hard to recover from the distraction of the highly partisan opening, which had only the most tangential relationship to the subject of the article itself. "Condoms with communion wafers" is a rather memorable alliteration, but in the interest of a strong opening and cohesive writing as a whole, I suggest you save it for a health care politics piece, not for an article about trends in language and internationalization. Thank you for your time and consideration.

 

10JACOBF

3:31 PM ET

February 14, 2012

I don't think it's that simple...

1). Your first point is that Americans not only know too few foreign languages but are getting worse at it.

I've looked at this problem myself and it appears we're not alone. News sources I've seen point out that any English-speaking country (think Canada, UK, or Australia) has this problem as bad as we do. And experts there are equally troubled. But from what I make of it, this is one of those pitfalls from being in a country that already speaks the international language of communications, Internet, science, diplomacy, commerce, aviation, etc.

Though you are rightfully alarmed about it, there's really not much to it if you ask me. America is better known as the graveyard of languages not a melting pot - it's old news and I don't think it matters much now. Besides, how well did public school levels of French or other languages pan out in later life anyway? The issue probably doesn't matter.

2). You also said that, in bulk, fewer Americans travel abroad than Germans or Britons.

But isn't that because Europe has dozens of countries and languages whereas North America largely has just three? For Europeans traveling abroad means jumping on a train or a few hours of driving; and a good chance of encountering a completely different language to boot. But in America or Canada traveling abroad means a half-day plane ride at least; and local linguistic variation is rather anemic by comparison.

Again, I think that's rather irrelevant.

3). And another point you made was that American media is too Amero-centric when it comes to news.

Well what else would you expect? When I look at British news sources their news is primarily about countries in the Commonwealth or covering European football matches. And for Japanese news sources it seems that anything that involves ethnic Japanese is reported on and don't do much better than US sources for covering foreign-based news.

Once again, a rather flimsy argument.

4). And then there's all the economic metrics you discussed.

What I got from it is that we import too much and invest too little abroad. Both of those things have been a way of life for several decades now so I see little reason to make much fuss about it. Though I think we'd be better off otherwise I still think that this is a rather dull, historically evident point to make.

5.) Too few students going abroad for studying.

Well this is much more complex than a few paragraphs you gave it; Charles Kenny did it better weeks ago. But then again the reason for this has a lot to do with what I said in point 2. Although I don't know any better, I seriously don't think Europeans are traveling much further than Americans are for study abroad programs. It's usually 2nd world or 3rd world nations that go to exotic, around-the-world places for education.

*I'll concede: In the whole, yes I think America would do better by being more "global" but it won't work the same way so many other countries do it. Though I can't argue that the geography lessons concern me and need thorough reforms.

 

REKLAMOLOGY

4:16 PM ET

February 14, 2012

Outward Bound

Unfortunately, chances are that those numbers will go down rather than up in the future. The percentage of U.S. elementary and middle schools offering foreign-language instruction fell between google reklam 1997 and 2008 -- from 75 percent to 58 percent in the case of middle schools

 

GUWINSTER

7:21 PM ET

February 14, 2012

One point of disagreement

Of course the UK and especially Germany send more tourists abroad than does the US. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you don't even need a passport to visit at least 26 other countries if you're a German. You can simply get in a car and drive a few hours to the Netherlands. Any German could conceivably make a day trip (in their car) to multiple foreign countries without any papers.

An American in say ...Georgia... faces a $100+ passport fee, a 20+ hour one way drive, and only two possible countries to visit. If you want to argue an American could fly to other countries, the only place that even approaches the convenience of simply flying across the Channel would be if a Floridian were to go vacation in the Bahamas.

Fortunately, Americans have the luxury of living in a big, diverse country and many Americans do not need to leave the country because it would take multiple lifetimes just to explore (both physically and intellectually) the complexities of our own country.