HONG KONG - What a contrast! After three years living in Asia, I returned to the United States a couple of months ago, with enormous respect for how Asia has pulled itself together after its own devastating crisis in the late 1990s. Now I was back.

Bouncing back and forth only deepened my conviction that an important shift in the gravity of global economic power from the West to the East could well be at hand.

It's not just the Asian miracle that reinforces my belief in such a possibility. America has lost its way. In the years I was away, it has become a very different place. The despair of chronically high joblessness is sapping the nation's sense of self and poisoning the political debate.

Back in mid-2007, when I moved to Hong Kong, the U.S. unemployment rate stood at just 4.6 percent. Today, it is more than double that at 9.6 percent. Nor is there much hope of a spontaneous resurgence of hiring that will temper the angst of this jobless recovery.

How could Asia get it so right, and the United States get it so wrong?

I suspect a good deal of the answer has to do with the arrogance of power. Long the dominant global power, America took its image for granted and its dominance as an entitlement. Asia, on the other hand, was far more humble. It learned painful lessons from a series of very tough experiences - the post-Cultural Revolution chaos of the Chinese economy, the post-bubble aftershocks of Japan, and the ravages of its own financial crisis in 1997-98.

But Asia also benefited from a deep appreciation of the limits of policy. Stability became the mantra of the region - especially social and economic stability. Asian policies - fiscal, monetary, currency and regulatory - are all focused on avoiding the types of disruptions that have wreaked such havoc on America.

Once that genie is out of the bottle, Asians are dubious of a policy fix. That is the lesson they take from Japan and now from the United States. It is a lesson that keeps Asian authorities committed to a pre-emptive approach in avoiding major threats to stability.

David Fuller's view Some diligent analysts have pointed out that approximately 100 years of history have shown that it takes from 5 to 7 years, on average, for economies to recover from slumps caused by credit crises. In my observation this seems about right. However recovery from a slump is not the same as regaining or surpassing former economic heights.

Significantly, the Asian and South American emerging (progressing) economies have done this in style but they were starting from lower levels of economic development. Clearly, Japan as a developed economy has not approached its developed economy growth of the 1980s.

No one should expect the USA to succeed in reflating its property and consumer spending bubbles, nor should it even attempt to do this. A more disciplined cycle of higher domestic savings, a reduction in federal and municipal government deficits now that an extreme economic collapse has been avoided, and a new cycle of corporate capital expenditure would seem far more appropriate.