Until the current global economic crisis, China, India, Russia, Brazil, and other rapidly developing countries were clearly improving the lot of their citizens, stepping up their diplomacy, in many cases modernizing their militaries, and, in general, exercising greater influence in the world.
While the American government has been occupied in Mesopotamia, and our European allies continue to starve their defense programs, Asian militaries — in particular those of China, India, Japan and South Korea — have been quietly modernizing and in some cases enlarging.
Cellular technology is hardly novel, and transit systems throughout the world have been able to modernize in some cases more than a decade ago.
"Despite high vacancy rates -- or because of them, in some cases -- some owners are investing in modernizing their buildings or in repositioning them as higher-quality properties," Mr. Frank said.
Tradable goods manufacturing is essential to modernizing an economy, as seen from the successful development cases of Japan, Taiwan, Korea and Singapore.
And in the most expensive case yet, the Poway Unified School District borrowed $105 million to finish modernizing older school buildings, which local property owners will be paying off until four decades from now at an eventual cost of nearly $1 billion.
Over the past 15 or so years, some of the most original and idiosyncratic art institutions in the country — the Barnes, the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades, Calif., and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston — have embarked on major expansions to modernize (and in some cases, to generate more revenue), significantly transforming their identities.
In each case there has been an explosive clash between the rapidly modernizing city and the embattled, conservative village culture upon which the capital increasingly encroaches.
Supported by President Nicolas Sarkozy as a means of modernizing the French legal system, the law has had several unintended consequences, not least of which has been a flood of cases in the appeals courts.
The first Russia is modernizing.
They are modernizing anyway".
