"Market-dominant minorities are often the principal engines of economic growth in a country. This is certainly true of the Chinese in Southeast Asia. So, their economic impact in some ways has been tremendous. They've generated tremendous economic growth over the years.

On the other hand, their presence is a source of enormous instability, especially when you combine it with rapid democratization because the situation of having a small - a situation of where the rich people are not just rich but they are viewed as ethnic outsiders fueling the nation's wealth. It's just incredibly destabilizing, so I actually think that market-dominant minorities are, I say that they're the Achilles heel of free market democracy in the non-Western world.

Now, to go back to your question about the United States, that's by analogy whereas in most of the book I write about individual countries. I suggest by analogy that at the global level you see a very similar phenomenon.

Basically, the United States has become the world market-dominant minority and the analogy has its limits. I mean obviously Americans are not an ethnic group. We're a melting pot and nor is there democracy at the global level.

On the other hand, you see very - you see just the same kinds of dynamics. I mean the Americans are four percent of the world's total population and yet we wield, just like the Chinese in Indonesia or the Lebanese in West Africa, we wield just astonishingly disproportionate economic power relative to our numbers.

And from China to the Middle East to France, we are perceived, I think correctly, as the principal engines and principal beneficiaries of global capitalism. You know we dominate global markets in every respect, technological, financial, cultural.

And I think for this, for our extraordinary market dominance and our seeming global invincibility, we have earned the envy and fear and deep resentment of much of the rest of the world."