Quote of the Day (So Far!)

The line of the day comes from Kay Hymowitz's perceptive, comprehensive, and sure to be controversial new essay in City Journal on the "New Girl Order": "There's much to admire in the New Girl Order - and not just the previously hidden cleavage." In the piece, Hymowitz traces the globalization of the Single Young Female lifestyle which, she argues, "reflects a series of stunning demographic and economic shifts that are pointing much of the world - with important exceptions, including Africa and most of the Middle East - toward a New Girl Order. It's a man's world, James Brown always reminded us. But if these trends continue, not so much." One area I'd like to see Hymowitz explore in the future is the political implications of the New Girl Order. At the moment, the women Hymowitz describes in her piece are young, and so we may assume they do not vote in great numbers. What happens to our politics when they begin to do so? One more thought on Hymowitz's essay. The stunning sociocultural transformation she describes -

By the late 1990s, the SYF lifestyle was fully globalized. Indeed, you might think of SYFs as a sociological Starbucks: no matter how exotic the location, there they are, looking and behaving just like the American prototype. They shop for shoes in Kyoto, purses in Shanghai, jeans in Prague, and lip gloss in Singapore; they sip lattes in Dublin, drink cocktails in Chicago, and read lifestyle magazines in Krakow; they go to wine tastings in Boston, speed-dating events in Amsterdam, yoga classes in Paris, and ski resorts outside Tokyo.

• is possible only because the last 25 years have seen an unprecedented level of global economic growth as command economies across the world have opted for the market. The thing that undergirds this economic development is peace, and the thing that undergirds this peace is American power. If America's power were to diminish, if illiberal forces were to go on the march across the world, you can be sure that the development of the New Girl Order, among many other things, would grind to a halt.