New York City & North America
US Global Significance
wealthiest, perhaps most iconic, and, by many rankings, most important city. Though its choice as Home Base for Baret students while in America may seem obvious from its scale alone, that’s just one reason for its selection. Immense- ly walkable and connected by a metro with the largest number of stations (424) in the world, it is very easy to get around what has become several cities within a city. New York is America’s center of televi- sion news, publishing, art, fashion, and fi- nance. Two of the world’s top 10 museums, the Metropolitan and MOMA, are here. In Baret’s first year, the UN held its “Summit on the Future” when Baret was in town. Un- beknownst to many, it is America’s largest college town with 1,000,000 students in higher education, which includes Parsons, Columbia University, and New York Uni- versity—which has the largest number of in- ternational students of any US college. New York is often ranked as the world’s most di- verse city with over 40% of its residents born outside of the US. And, behind Silicon Val- ley, it is America’s 2nd largest start-up hub. Across our 20 days in New York City and its neighboring regions, we conduct 10, 2-3 hour Morning Programs as extensively discussed earlier in this book. We assemble a number of speakers, authors, and perfor- mance groups and, to do that at the highest quality, Baret needs tremendous talent to choose from. New York has that and more. In the city, there are 250,000 businesses in- cluding 10% of all the S&P 500; 3200 asso- ciations; 220 colleges and universities; and the HQs of the country’s largest news orga- nizations including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, ABC, NBC, CNN and FOX. Nearly 15% of all the journalists in America live in the New York metro area. These assets ensure a world-class Baret Morning Program. The city lends itself to long weekends that Baret students enjoy. There are moun- tain ranges just a couple of hours to the north and some of the world’s great beach- es 100 miles east of the city. If bumpy by Chinese and European standards, rail sys- tems connect the entire Northeast Corri- dor from Boston to Washington, a region where 1/7th of the US population resides. For the subsequent Fellowship programs around North America, direct and eco- nomic air service is plentiful. Finally, NYC residents know that Sep- tember and October are the best times to be here. Warm but not too hot.
“WE HOLD these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happi- ness.” There, in one 1776 sentence, is the beginning of America, drawn from the collectively-Oedipal efforts of its Found- ing Fathers to throw off Father England. America was founded by change agents, rebels with a cause, people wanting freedom from existing constraints and orthodoxies. And for 250 years it has been a global sym- bol of freedom, messy and imperfect as it is. By the tens of millions, similarly minded individuals immigrated to the United States to find their piece of The American Dream. And, largely, it has worked. Arguably no country on earth has seen such liberty, not just politically, but economically. America’s revolutionary bent spawned one of the most entrepreneurial cultures ever, which gave rise to its dramatic growth. America’s econ- omy is, by nominal measures, the largest in the world at $27 trillion. While only 4% of the global population, the US accounts for roughly 15% of global GDP. Freedom of the press prospered here and that ability to “say what you will” has led to one of the world’s most self-examining, self-critical cultures. Autocrats abroad mar- vel at the uncontrollability of it all. Newspa- pers, magazines, and documentaries reveal how the American story is not as simple as what’s served up in high school textbooks, how it has not delivered for minorities, women, or the indigenous people of early America. However, America continues, and a deep understanding of it is imperative. Why NYC? NEW YORK City became the world’s first mega city passing the 10mm population mark in the 1930s. Though it now ranks 11th in the world’s most populated me- tropolises, through the second half of the 20th century it was viewed as the world’s greatest city—and it remains the globe’s
“We are called the nation of inventors. And we are. We could still claim that title and wear its loftiest honors if we had stopped with the first thing we ever invented, which was human liberty.” MARK TWAIN
Aerial view of Central Park´s Great Lawn
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BARET SCHOLARS
REGIONS & FELLOWSHIPS
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