Twitter’s initial public offering last week was everything that Facebook’s botched offering a year and a half ago was not: the stock was reasonably priced; management wooed investors; and the company neither promised the moon nor the stars, and was rewarded with a substantial amount of cash raised, a stock that went up more than 75 percent, and a valuation of $25 billion.

Though shares pulled back sharply — and predictably — the day after its IPO, Twitter has now joined the pantheon of leading social media companies. It has yet to make a profit,?but?unlike the 1990s Internet comets it is routinely compared to, it is? making substantial revenue ?(on pace for just under $600 million this year). That is substantially less than Facebook was making when it went public ($3.7 billion), but more than LinkedIn was generating when it went public in 2011 (estimated at $220 million).

That said, at its IPO Twitter was valued higher than either Facebook or LinkedIn at the time of their public offerings. In that sense, Twitter’s reception does raise a vital question: are these companies doing more than making their founders and investors rich? Are they doing more than satisfying some nice need of their customers? Are they, in short, changing the world the way they claim? Or is that claim just a useful marketing device that makes otherwise pedestrian businesses appear to be something far grander, convincing investors to pay more than they would for equivalent businesses in more prosaic industries?

I’ve been wondering about this question for several years, and for now, it remains a question. The hype and draw of social media in its many and various forms is undeniable. Whether it is the Twitter IPO, or Yahoo’s $1 billion purchase of Tumblr, or the panoply of new companies that pop up in Silicon Valley and NYC’s Silicon Alley, these companies have buzz and they also garner income. Because so many of them serve as new media companies, occupying the same general space as journalists, they garner attention. Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer gets substantial press, far more than the chief executive officers of many companies many times larger. The same can be said for Twitter and before it Groupon, Zynga, and a host of others whose size was modest compared to many public companies, but whose profile was anything but.

Ask denizens of the Valley what they think, and they’ll say that companies like Twitter command premiums and generate buzz because they are transformative. They are transformative the way that Apple, Google, Microsoft and Oracle were transformative. They change the way consumers and businesses live and function, and they make it possible for people to connect ever more seamlessly to the products, services and people that they wish to and need to. Or so the argument goes.

The Obamacare blame game is in full swing, and without other news to fill pages and airtime, it’s likely to continue for some time. Attention is shifting from the myriad problems with the official website Healthcare.gov, and toward the health plans that are being canceled, even though President Obama promised that they would not be.

But the longer-term story isn’t the rollout and its many severe glitches. No one recalls whether the first batch of Social Security checks was sent on time in the late 1930s. The story that will matter, and linger, is that the Affordable Care Act was the first major law implemented almost entirely online. It’s the template for the future, and rather than using its launch as an excuse to renew attacks on the law, we need to learn what we can because, like this bill or not, it is part of the next wave of government.

The past two weeks have been filled with various individuals testifying to Congress about the design and implementation of Healthcare.gov, the web portal that allows individuals to access the new health plans and exchanges. The tenor of these hearings, convened by the Republican-controlled House, is that the design of the website exposed the fundamental failings of the law and government incompetence. But what’s actually been exposed is that the U.S. government has not yet made the transition to a digital age. While the administration could have and should have done far better, the reasons for its failure are less about a flawed process than a system currently ill-designed for this type of legislation.

The New York City mayoral race is entering its final days, and it seems all but certain that Bill de Blasio will be the new master of City Hall. That’s prompted anxiety among some in New York, best encapsulated by an ad run by Republican challenger Joseph Lhota warning that the city would revert to a 1970s crime-ridden cesspit if de Blasio is elected.

Not only is this fear misplaced, but it represents a deep misunderstanding of what has transpired in New York, the United States, and much of the developed world in the past two decades. The transformation of New York and a plethora of American cities into thriving and relatively affluent hubs in the past 20 years is not, as is widely believed, the product of astute mayors and innovative policing. Rather, cities have been transformed because their residents and industries have transformed them.

That is not the common story. In New York, the legend goes that Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg the city turned to the innovative policing of two-time commissioner Ray Kelly to end the deleterious waves of crime, reduce the red-tape, repair crumbling infrastructure and make the city hospitable to business and commerce.*

This current bout of Washington inanity is approaching its denouement, but however it ends, it has accelerated a trend that has been gathering steam for at least the last five years: the move away from a Washington-centric world and towards a new, undefined, but decidedly less American global system.

The latest broadside was the widely disseminated editorial in China’s state-run news agency Xinhua, which called for a “de-Americanized world” that no longer depends on the dollar and is thus no longer at the whim of “intensifying domestic political turmoil in the United States.” That follows on the heels of a Vladimir Putin’s op-ed in the New York Times in which he called out the American tendency to see itself as an exceptional, indispensable nation. “It is extremely dangerous,” Putin concluded, “to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation.”

The fact that these two powerful critiques of America’s place in the world were written by the United States’ historical adversaries should not be an excuse to dismiss their substance. Yes, these broadsides were politically motivated, and they play to domestic and international audiences that celebrate anyone who stands up to the big, bad Americans. But even a hypocritical adversary can have keen observations, and in both cases, the message was the same: the United States may be a powerful country that controls the world’s reserve currency and has the world’s predominant military, but that does not mean it is the global leader, the world’s policeman or anything other than a first among equals at best.

Before we begin, let it be said that the looming possibility of the U.S.’s default on its own debt is a not-insignificant issue. Let it also be said that the U.S. government may be unwilling to pay interest on its multi-trillion dollar publicly-held debt as of mid-October, and that this carries substantial risks. And, finally, let it be said that this is something we should most definitely avoid.

The potential for a default — however self-inflicted — raises the specter of just about every bad thing economically that you can imagine. And there have been no dearth of voices drawing attention to a variety of doomsday scenarios. The U.S. Treasury Department, which is not normally known for its hyperbole, just issued a report warning of a global economic depression should the U.S. default: interest rates will skyrocket, financial markets will panic, and the global financial system will lose one of its only bastions of predictability and stability.

Five years ago, Lehman Brothers was allowed to fail because of a complacent and erroneous view that its effect would be limited to little more than a market disruption. Today, the prospect of a U.S. default is met with the opposite of complacency. The only voices expressing skepticism that a default would be catastrophic are the very Tea Party ultras ?whose burn, baby, burn mantra appears to welcome the possibility of an implosion. How else to purify and rebuild a corrupt system?

Washington may once again be careening toward an abyss of its own making, but it is not the only story worth attending to. It makes good theater, but for now we don’t know how or if it will fundamentally shape our lives.

So what will? Half a world away, a Chinese company is considering a public offering. That would seem of even less import, but this is no ordinary company. It is Alibaba, which is to China what eBay and Amazon are to the United States. It is the leading e-commerce company in the Middle Kingdom, and it is led by a visionary entrepreneur named Jack Ma who has transformed that space in China as surely as Jeff Bezos has in the United States. And now, Alibaba wants to go public. The IPO could value Alibaba at as much as $75 billion.  

That would be noteworthy in and of itself, for sheer size and scope. More intriguing is that, according to reports, it is increasingly likely that the company will sell its shares not in Hong Kong, which is part of China, but instead in New York City, which is decidedly not. Only two years ago, Alibaba made a serious play to buy Yahoo, which was an early investor and is still a substantial shareholder. Now, Alibaba may soon join Yahoo and a host of other competitors as a publicly-traded company listed on a U.S. exchange.

So the Federal Reserve did not taper after all, as we know from its mini-bombshell of an announcement on September 18th. Having signaled in May and June that the central bank was likely to pare back its monthly purchases of $85 billion in mortgage and treasury bonds, the bank and its chairman Ben Bernanke essentially said “Never mind,” and decided that now was not the time after all.

The reaction was swift, vociferous and excoriating. The financial community reacted as if it had been stabbed in the back. One longtime trader and respected commentator announced that he was “absolutely disgusted” by the decision or lack thereof. The best line came from a strategist at a leading investment house who said , “I am perplexed and baffled. I do this for a living. I shouldn’t be so confused and confounded.”

Actually he should be. We all should be. The Fed’s decision is a much-needed slap in the face to the financial world. The Fed’s statement was laden with typically stolid prose, but if you could have distilled it and the subsequent press conference by Bernanke, the message would have been simply this: “There is no certainty. Get over it.”

Five years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the onset of the 2008-2009 financial crisis, the U.S. housing market is at last starting to thrive. It has, in fact, been steadily improving over the past years, and that trend has only accelerated of late. Housing is widely perceived as a key ingredient to a healthy economy, and so the revival in the housing market has been heralded as a positive step for an American system that has been sluggish at best. Similar trends in the United Kingdom and parts of the EU are greeted as positives as well.

But is it? Housing is a key aspect of economic activity in most countries, but that doesn’t mean that we should welcome a return to housing as a perceived pillar of national strength. And we should be very wary of any return to an ethos that sees either home ownership or housing prices as a barometer of individual and collective success. Those attitudes very nearly imploded the modern financial system, and they could imperil it again.

Homes are places where you live. They are not — and should never have been — investment vehicles. Yes, homes may gain in value and augment one’s net worth, but the reason to own a home is that it can be a cost-effective way to obtain a place to live. The minute they are seen as investments, that reality gets perverted, with dangerous consequences.

In 1973, Arthur Schlesinger wrote about the tendency in American history for the president to assume sweeping powers in times of war and crisis . The balance of power established by the Constitution gets upended; Congress and the courts take a back seat; and the executive makes decisions about life and death largely unchecked. He called this “the imperial presidency.” Today, with President Obama turning to Congress to endorse a military strike on Syria, the imperial presidency is beginning to wane.

It’s about time. The 1990s seemed to presage a return to a more balanced government, with Cold War defense spending slashed and “the peace dividend” contributing to a more balanced budget. But then 9/11 happened; America launched a war on terror; and the rest, as they say, is history.

The imperial presidency has some justification in times of acute peril. The immediate aftermath of 9/11 certainly justified some degree of unilateral executive action, as did in its way the financial crisis in the fall of 2008. And few would argue that at times of all-out war, with the country fully mobilized to fight a genuine threat such as Germany and Japan during World War Two, ceding powers to the executive branch is imperative.

August this year has been exceptionally unkind to the emerging world. We know that Egypt has been plunged into political and economic turmoil, yet that is only the most extreme case. Elsewhere, stories proliferate about economic slowdowns in Peru and China, and protests in Brazil and Turkey (among others).

Yet rather than viewing these events in the larger context of the past decade, the most common response is to write the obituary of emerging world development. As a lead article in the New York Times said this week : “with expectations mounting that the Federal Reserve, led by its departing chairman Ben S. Bernanke, may soon begin to tighten its monetary spigot, Istanbul’s skyline could well be a harbinger of an emerging-market bust brought on by unpaid loans, weakening currencies and, eventually, the possible failure of developers and banks.” The Wall Street Journal even got a tad cheeky, saying about the investing landscape , “Buying Dips? Stick To Hummus, Not Emerging Markets.”

These obituaries are likely to be premature. Our imperialist mindset — a hangover from the 20th century — suggests that developing countries are always helpless without the West. That says more about our limited analytical abilities than about how the emerging world will fare.