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THE WELFARE STATE: FOOD FOR THOUGHT
The United State of America is the world's greatest economic power in terms of both Gross National Product and per capitaGNP, with its exports accounting for more than 10% of all world trade.
Although the importance of industrial production is falling and that of services growing (as in mostof Western Europe), the United States remains the world's greatest maker of industrial goods and around 20 million Americans are still employed in manufacturing.
The industrial heart of thenation is the Midwest around the Great Lakes, especially in the region stretching from southern Michigan through Northern Ohio and into the Pittsburgh area of Pennsylvania. Another important industrial region is the Northeast, which is the home of the major computer manufacturers. Service industries are also very important in this region and New York is the country's banking and insurance capital.The nation's fastest growing region, however, is the Southeast, where the chemical industry and high-technology industries are now catching up with the traditional textile industry as many firms exploit the warm climate and low labour costs.
47 per centof the land areaof the United States is farmland,of which 152million hectares are harvested cropland and 560 million hectares are permanentpastureland. And yet, only 6.2 million people live on the nation's farms and todayfarmers make up a little more than 2 per cent of the American population.
The American farmer's success is one of the less publicized wonders of the 20th century. By the mid-1970s a single farmer could grow enough food to feed himself, forty five other Americans, and eight foreigners. Agriculture is one of the biggest and most basic productive enterprises. It feeds the nation and supplies raw materials to most industries. In a single year farmers in the United States grow crops valued at some $25 billion.
The ever intensifying production has exacted its price.In an attempt to stabilize farm income, theUS Government has paid farmers billions of dollars in the past decade. Spokesmen for the consumers have charged farmers and the food-processing industry with sacrificing nutrition and tastein their efforts to mass-produce meat, poultry, fruit, vegetables, and grain products.
Much of the machinery onUS farms is automated, computers determine what animals eat. Such technology costs money. In 1940 American farmers invested about $52 billionin land, livestock, buildings, and equipment.By the
1990s the amount had climbed to more than $400 billion, even though farms had dropped in number from 6 million to fewer that 3 million. Many people had to sell their small family farms because they could not find the necessary capitalto run them. Nevertheless, about 95 per cent of US farms are still family owned, although nowadays they tend to be large and are often incorporated. Meanwhile, true corporation/arms, supervised by boards of directors and professional managers, are increasing in number. The number of American farms is expected to be cutin half, to about 1.5 million, while the amount of cultivated land will remain about the same. Farm output, however, will probably double.
Some agriculturists envision a future where weather will be made to order, robots will operate the farm machinery, millions of identical cattle will be produced as clones from a single superior «parent», and crops will grow lush and green under a pollution-free sky.It is a fairy tale, but the truth is that the amazing productivity of American farmers has ensured that much of the world will have enough to eat for the next 20 or 30 years.
THE CITY OF LONDON: ITS PAST AND PRESENT
London has been an important centre for finance for many years and the City is the financial centre of London. It contains the Bank of England, the Stock Exchange and hundreds of insurance; banking and finance companies. This goes back to the 12th century when Lombards — moneylenders from Lombardy— settled in London.
A Lombard meant a native of Lombardy in Italy, whose ancestors were the Germanic people who conquered Italy in the 6th century. This term was applied in the Middle Ages to bankers, moneylenders, and pawnbrokers, many of whom were from Lombardy or elsewhere in north Italy. Italian bankers played an important part in financing the English Crown in the 13th and 14th centuries.In return for their loans, such firms as the Riccardi of Lucca and the Frescobaldi of Florence received substantial gifts and a variety,of business privileges.
Italian bankers received gifts because the charging of interest on a loan of money was forbidden by medieval cannon law and punishable in the ecclesiastical courts. Interest on loans, such as those made by Italian bankers to the Crown in the late 13th and 14th centuries, was thus paid in other forms until legally permitted in the 16th century.
Dislike for these advantages, their power, and their association with unpopular government policies at the beginning of the 14th-century culminated in the expulsion of the Frescobaldi by the Lords Ordainers — the committee of 21 lords that Edward II was forced to appoint in 1311. The strain of heavy royal borrowing brought the collapse of the Riccardi in 1294 and of the Bardi and Peruzzi of Florence in the mid-14th century.
Many Italian bankers occupied premises in what became Lombard Street, in
London.
The City covers one square mile in the centre of modem London. This is the area of the original city of Londinium founded by the Romans around AD 50. It remain the same for a thousand years until the Normans came from France in 1066.
William the Conqueror gave the Saxons in the City a special Charter, and the City is still independent from the rest of London. It has its own council called the Corporation of the City of London, its own Lord Mayor and its own police force.
Until very recently, the area was the home of the «City gent» with a black bowler hat and a tightly rolled umbrella; the bowler is rarely seen today. In contrast to the entertainment district in the West End of London, the City is almost deserted at night. Although hundreds of thousands of people work in its offices by day, only about eight thousand actually live within the square mile.
The City is very rich and has a lot of influence. The term «the City» is often used to refer to the financial world in Britain in general. But to many observers the City seems increasingly independent of the British domestic economy: in fact, the City is central to international finance. When London was an imperial capital, the City was its financial heart, but in the age of telecommunications, the City could be situated anywhere.