People keep emailing me nostalgia, great charts where I can pick out music of the ‘50s, photos of the immigrant sections of NYC in the 1880s, lists of stuff that we don’t use anymore like glass milk bottles, steel roller skates and such. It’s fun to look at and listen to if you don’t have anything better to occupy your time but the problem is, it all has a message and the message is wrong. The message is, what a great time that was and don’t you wish we were all back there? The answer is a resounding NO! I grew up in the ‘40s and ‘50s, the time to which, nostalgia freaks most harken back. The ‘40s were a time of WWII a great time for nostalgia what with millions of murders, world-wide destruction and horrors beyond description. Of course we did have the Andrews Sisters. The ‘50s another nostalgia target was a time of ultimate bigotry where anyone who wasn’t a WASP was an outsider and when nigger, wop, mick, polak, chink, fag and jap were part of everyday speech and bullies were the kings of the schoolyard. We did have do-wop but we also had Eugene McCarthy and the House Un American Activities Committee.
We all know we can’t go back but more than that we shouldn’t want to go back because even the good parts will not be the way we remembered them. And that is the point of today’s piece. All the politicians and pundits are busy chasing ways to return us to the economic prosperity of the’70s, ‘80s and even a couple of years ago and they all have theories on how we can do it and people to blame for why we can’t but the reality is that you can’t go back, we never could, all we can do is go forward.
The industrial revolution of the 1800s, which changed America from a nation of cobblers and carpenters to a nation of industrial might was the product of innovation. Innovation has always been the thing that made and kept our country in the forefront of the world. We invented processes and products and we manufactured them and delivered them to the rest of the world. But that was a different world. We had the labor force, the natural resources, the innovative ability and the will to be the greatest nation in the world and we had almost no competition. Now we are faced with a world that is much different than the one in which we were the only game in town. Our success made us fat and lazy and much of our labor force can no longer do the work required by this century’s innovative businesses.
When we went from those cobblers and carpenters in the 1800s some of the work stayed here and continued to be done by those who had done it previously but a great deal of it went overseas. Sure that hurt but there was so much else going on and such a demand for labor here, that rather than morn for the departed jobs we were importing immigrants in order to fill the expanding pool of new ones. That was the cause of the great Asian, Italian, Irish and Middle-European immigrations of the middle and late 1800s. We had jobs available and their countries didn’t. That is no longer true.
Products and processes that we invented are now being produced in other parts of the world because they can be manufactured just as well and far less expensively outside the U.S. So what do we do about that? Do we enforce ever-larger tariffs to discourage imports? Do we penalize American firms that set up manufacturing plants in foreign countries employing foreign workers to do the work our laborers used to do? No. Those kinds of measures are counterproductive. Our standard of living is much higher than those of countries where wages are far below ours and the only way we will ever be able to compete is to lower our standards to match theirs. That’s just not going to happen.
But we don’t want those jobs anyhow. I know, if you’re out of a job, you want any job, but no matter what you want they aren’t coming back and they aren’t really the problem. The number of low wage jobs available here has actually grown in the last couple of years. High wage jobs have remained stable but it’s middle wage jobs that have declined and those are the jobs that make America what it was and will be.
The problem we’re having started way back in the ‘80s with the collapse of the Soviet Union and a heretofore unimagined expansion of markets for our products. This expansion was great for U.S. manufacturing, more than doubling the demand for American products but as soon as this happened, manufacturers realized that since these markets now existed they could be increased even more by actually setting up plants in these countries which would put more money in the hands of the consumers and at the same time make it easier and cheaper to supply product for them. Coke Cola, which was one of the first companies to see the potential of these markets, now has plants making coke in 206 countries around the world. Coke isn’t going to close those plants and bring those jobs back here. The same is true for almost all other existing industries. We invented solar panels but because our banks wouldn’t finance the construction of plants here that business has now gone to China where they are making most of the solar panels for the world. Those plants are not going to be ripped down and brought back here but if they had been built here in the first place it wouldn’t have been feasible to rebuild them in China just to pick up the lower cost of labor. It would have happened eventually when new plant had to be built because the old one had become obsolete but we would have had fifteen or twenty years, a generation of employment for the workers in that industry in this country.
Today the top 500 companies in US get 47% of their income from foreign markets. In the past most of our job growth came from innovation & technology. We used to be first in innovation, now we rank 6th. Despite this America has always been an innovator and that is continuing but innovation creates pressure to have the kinds of skills necessary to work in the new technologies. Right now we are not producing workers who have the skills for the industries that require them.
Nano & Micro technology if developed here can be manufactured here and stay here for at least a generation before it becomes economically feasible to build new plants overseas. But if we are to make that work we must educate our work force to deal with these advances in technology.
To develop this innovative technology we need research & development on a major scale. Industry does some of this but it has always been the government that pushed R&D. Most of the technology we now take for grated, cells phones, computers, GPS, rocket science and many more are the product of defense department development after WWII. The government, low on funds from two wasted wars, is more and more shying away from funding these types of experiments. But even if we do the development and innovation we will still need to fix our educational system if we are going to be able to fill the new jobs with American workers.
40% of Science Doctorates are now issued to foreigners and then our immigration laws force them to go back home, so instead of those newly minted scientists staying here, innovating and inventing new business that create new jobs they are going back to their home countries to do that there.
But most people don’t get doctorates, just like despite the fact that we have 19 of the top 20 rated universities in the world, most people don’t go to Stanford or MIT. We need higher standards of education, especially in math & science in our grade and high schools and we definitely need the long abandoned trade schools to teach the skills needed to work in specific technologies.
But to achieve higher standards we need better teachers. U.S. primary & secondary schools are now rated 52nd in the world in teaching Math & Science. We’re 12th in high school graduation. There was a time in this country when we had a captive labor force that we could depend on to teach our children. It was called women. In those days women didn’t become lawyers, doctors, or engineers the way they do now. In those days women didn’t receive the same level of compensation as their male counterparts so we got used to underpaying teachers.
Right now in this country we are underpaying our good teachers and not firing our bad ones. This is the road to disaster. We must pay those who teach commensurate with the immense importance of what they are doing. We must get rid of those who are unwilling or unable to accomplish that incredibly important task. That means the unions have to back off their defense of incompetent teachers and that the government has to increase good teachers pay to a level equivalent to that of comparable industries.
Our country had a very brief chance to jolt itself out of the economic doldrums fostered by eight years of Bush economic policy but any chance of a quick recovery was washed away by a combination of fear generated by the right, cowardice exhibited by the Obama White House and the usual venal writhing by a useless congress.
Rham Emmanuel had the right slogan, “never waste a crisis” unfortunately nobody had the stones to jump in and take a chance. Obama was too new at the game, the Republicans were too invested in having Obama fail no matter how it affected the country and the Democrats in congress were too busy covering their asses and trying to hold onto jobs they lost anyway.
The Tarp package should have been twice as big and the Stimulus three times as big. Why not? The Tarp package worked, it saved the auto industry and the banks and it isn’t going to cost us anything. The Stimulus didn’t achieve its goal because it was too small and too much of it had to be wasted to support the Bush tax cuts. Maybe if it had been three times as big we’d already be laying track and building roads.
Now it’s too late. Obama doesn’t have the clout he needs to spend the money that needs to be spent, the Democrats don’t have the heart for any kind of fight and the Republicans think they can reconstitute the economy by pulling in their economic horns and trying to weather the storm. They’re probably right, but unfortunately that will take twenty years. Do all you people out there have that much time to stagnate?
What we have left is the long-term approach outlined above, education, innovation and an influx of cash to quickly build the industries that will fuel the future. The question becomes; is there anyone or any group left in the United States government that has the guts and the foresight to try to pull us out of this mess? At this point I just don’t see them out there.