Our world isn't so fragile

Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek has some insights on the resiliency of our global system. We're recovering from last year's financial mess a lot faster than pundits speculated at the time. Some of the reasons:

* We learned from the Great Depression and worked hard to not repeat its problems.

* The Great Powers haven't been this peaceful for at least 175 years. We're not competing with each other in military terms. This peace has allowed the creation of a world economy.

* The decades-long struggle over inflation has been won. There is only one country, Zimbabwe, battling high inflation.

* We now have a technological infrastructure to allow people around the world to talk in real-time and to spread information across borders. This diffusion of knowledge leads to stability and growth.

* Countries have worked hard to lift people out of poverty and are unwilling to sacrifice those gains to a worker's utopia or war.

* There are no competing ideologies, capitalism has no competitors. Countries, such as China, India, and Brazil have learned to be prudent with their economic systems (as in taming bubbles) and established countries could learn from the upstarts. These emerging countries are mature enough that they can withstand the messes created by the West.