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The World, Observed

The moment former Sen. Gary Hart told the audience at the Milken Institute\'s Global Conference that America is \"at a cross roads,\" Abe Zarem leaned over to me and said, \"He\'s wrong.\"\n\nThere were 1,500 people sitting in the audience listening to a panel tussle over the United States\' role in the world. For a conference that annually attracts the world\'s financial and academic elite, the seating at the Beverly Hilton was refreshingly democratic: no place cards, sit almost anywhere you like. So I found myself between Charlie Woo, the innovator behind downtown Los Angeles\' Toy Town district, and Zarem, inventor, professor, entrepreneur, thinker.\n\n\"Crossroads is not the right word,\" Zarem told me, correcting Hart, \"because at a crossroads you pick a direction and you know where you\'re going. We\'re at a cloverleaf. When you turn off a cloverleaf you don\'t know where you\'re going.\"
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April 3, 2003

The moment former Sen. Gary Hart told the audience at theMilken Institute’s Global Conference that America is “at a crossroads,” Abe Zarem leaned over to me and said, “He’s wrong.”

There were 1,500 people sitting in the audience listening toa panel tussle over the United States’ role in the world. For a conference thatannually attracts the world’s financial and academic elite, the seating at theBeverly Hilton was refreshingly democratic: no place cards, sit almost anywhereyou like. So I found myself between Charlie Woo, the innovator behind downtown Los Angeles’ Toy Town district, and Zarem, inventor, professor, entrepreneur,thinker.

“Crossroads is not the right word,” Zarem told me,correcting Hart, “because at a crossroads you pick a direction and you knowwhere you’re going. We’re at a cloverleaf. When you turn off a cloverleaf youdon’t know where you’re going.”

He’s right, and the better metaphor explains why MichaelMilken hosts his annual conference. Business leaders and others pay $1,900 ahead for three days of seminars, lectures and shmoozing, hoping to get a peakbehind the curves. The presenters are Nobel and Pulitzer Prize laureates,chiefs of finance, politics and academia, and, in Milken’s words, “about 40 peoplewho are paid to do nothing but think.”

The attendees seemed to break down along the “not mutuallyexclusive” lines of the intellectually curious, the portfolio warriors huntingopportunity and the elbow-rubbers, who figured that what works for Milken mightwork for them, too — George S. Kaufman called that “gelt by association.”

Milken’s genius has always been at mining capital markets tofind undiscovered value. In the 1980s, he restructured the corporate world byfocusing on financial markets. After legal battles and a jail term about whichhis official conference biography is admirably up front, his focus has expandedto other forms of undervalued capital, human and social.

Laying bare these veins of capital enables individuals andgovernments to unleash what Milken called “the most powerful force in theuniverse: compound interest.” (Milken claimed Albert Einstein said this aboutcompound interest, but Einstein authority Alice Calaprice has said he probablydidn’t.)

Milken, who was elected cheerleader at Birmingham HighSchool in the early 1960s, is cheerleading still, filling the dais with anenergy that wouldn’t be out of place at a human potential seminar. But — andthis is all to his credit — this was a conference devoted to the potential of humanity — and if in uncorking that potential some people profited, good for them, goodfor us all.

So, Monday evening’s panel discussion offered a hopeful viewof humanity’s potential. Moderated by Milken, the discussion featured NobelLaureate Robert Fagan, biologist Paul Ehrlich, futurist Alvin Toffler andlinguist Steven Pinker.

Fagan said that the obvious next source of unleashableenergy lay Far East.

“The most important economic event is the emergence ofChina,” Fagan said. “By 2030, the Chinese economy will be bigger than theeconomies of America and Europe put together.”

Other speakers on the panel agreed, and the presence ofentrepreneurs like Woo, founder of the Megatoys corporation, was all the proofthey needed. Drawing on a network of Asian contacts, Woo, 47, built the toydistrict downtown from a single $140,000 warehouse into an area that employsmore than 4,000 people, boasts revenues estimated at roughly $500 million ayear and controls the distribution of some 60 percent of the $12 billion intoys sold to American retailers. China is the new plastics.

Toffler said that the current economic meltdown is a hiccupin the “knowledge revolution,” what he called the “Third Wave” of humandevelopment after the agrarian and Industrial revolutions.

“Between 1750 and 1950 there were 27 financial crises inAmerica and England,” Toffler said. “None of them stopped the IndustrialRevolution.”

What stands in our way, Ehrlich warned, is our careless useof natural resources and the fact that a full third of the world still lives inpoverty. “The current system is unsustainable,” he said.

But Pinker and the others stressed humanity’s adaptability,our ability to innovate our way out of problems. By the evening’s end, evenEhrlich offered hope that “humanity, as smart as we are, will get smart enoughto save our butts.”

On Tuesday evening the “Big Picture” narrowed to focus on”America’s Role in the World.” This discussion featured William Bennett, formersecretary of education; Robert Bartley, editor emeritus of The Wall StreetJournal; Hart; and Stephan Richter, publisher and editor-in-chief of TheGlobalist. Despite King’s vain efforts to expand it, the debate swirled aboutthe current war. It became clear that so many of the big questions Americafaces — what we stand for, how we are to exercise our power, whether the worldwill fear us, hate us, respect us or all three — are being played out now inthe sands and cities of Iraq.

The conference provided a time to take a step back from anda more distant perspective on these unknowns, just before we turn off thecloverleaf.  

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