Posted on 10/01/2005 2:06:21 PM PDT by baseball_fan
Author Clyde Prestowitz discusses his new book concerning a shift in the global economy towards the East, America's educational institutions and future economic challenges in the 21st century.
PAUL SOLMAN: If you want to see where the world economy is heading, go east, young man and young woman, too. At least that's the message of "Three Billion New Capitalists: The Great Shift of Wealth and Power to the East." The author is Clyde Prestowitz, a veteran Asia watcher who began his career as a trade negotiator in the Reagan Administration. Prestowitz thinks all those factory workers in China and outsourcing jobs in India you keep seeing on the news are just the beginning of an economic tidal wave that Americans had better learn to live with, better learn to contend with. We sat down with Prestowitz recently to discuss the book.
(Excerpt) Read more at pbs.org ...
There's something more fundamental than that. Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong are not exactly poor and reliant on sweatshop labour. Societies prosper in relation to how much they prefer personal responsibility and initiative to state sponsored welfare. Asia is decidedly moving in the direction of personal initiative.
Regards, Ivan
"...Asia is decidedly moving in the direction of personal initiative"
Agree. Both a good thing in that we want those societies to be successful and be trading partners and a challenge as well in that we have less of a cultural competitive advantage. Our unity out of diversity has also been a great advantage.
I think we should call the "Big Bribe" theory.
I say great!
In 1950 the US has half the world's gdp and now it's only a third. No way in hell is anyone going to tell me that Americans were richer or more powerful in 1950 than now.
Well, these "bribes" were OK when one state was trying to induce more business at the expense of some state that had lost touch. I did not scream when companies in CA moved to TX. It made sense to me, because CA was taxing these companies a fortune for the privilege of doing business in CA. What can we do about Asia?
The answer is compete. Every company that moves some manufacturing over there must take a long term view that their technology had best be protected or they will end up competing with the Asian version of themselves. Not smart.
But it is smart to take a world view these days. You may move products to Asia and end up tripling the revenue when Asia starts buying the same products. But he is right about our education.
We need to immediately stop dumbing down the kids in our schools. We need to find teachers who provide the how and why as well as the inspiration to succeed in subjects like engineering and math. Wising up and rising to the challenge will keep this country in the chips. Failure here could prove costly.
The article is missing the mandatory BARF ALERT that's usually included with these loony left wing rants from PBS. One example: that "educational system is an embarrassment" routine. Why should we believe him if not even he believes it ("got their PhD's from Harvard and MIT..."). The whole interview is a stinking pile of Clinton-'90s-good / Bush-bad-- a rant that only a dedicated bush-basher could love.
Yes, and they will expect something in return. There is no such thing as 'free money, no strings attached'.
"...left wing rants"
??
- he was trade negotiator under Reagan
Wait a second. Are you saying that when he says we need more government control over industry like Clinton did then he's right because he's a real smart guy? Look, I don't care if he's the Pope on a pogo stick. When he says 2+2=5 he's wrong.
"Are you saying that when he says we need more government control over industry like Clinton did then he's right because he's a real smart guy?"
Please cite in the interview where you see these statements. I missed that.
I use to agree with this mentality, I would have to agree on some subjects that our kids are getting dumber. But I think the real problem is that there is less and less discipline and less and less morality within the schools. This in turn eventually effects the work force in society as this students graduate and become part of the work force. It use to be that a lot of those teenagers that didn't give a hoot would just drop out of school and go work in a factory and in many cases would be just as well off as those that stayed in school. You could do a lot with out a high school degree 30 years ago or more. Now days most factories and places require a high school diploma so more kids stay in school, and because of it the schools have to dumb down there requirements to get most of the students graduated and keep the federal funds a coming. The irony is a lot of these students end up working in a factory anyway or a job that is comparable.
One more thing I like to say about the less disciplined and the less morality in our schools. I'm seeing this filter down effect within the work force. The workers have less discipline and are more immoral(may be that's just what I see), the supervisors don't know how to deal with it other then, "don't do that or I'll write you up." which they never do, and a upper management that's afraid to fire anyone unless they call there lawyers or they are basically to stupid to figure out that is what they need to do and that is fire the people that don't want to follow directions, etc.
What kind of motivation do we give companies with world wide aspirations to stick around in the United States if the work force is becoming more undisciplined, the work force is becoming more immoral, and the costs toward legal requirements run your business is becomings more increasingly higher.
Education is the key, especially higher education. When our top business schools de emphasize nationalism and promote globalism, key CEO do not have any sense of being an American citizen or cares about long term effects when he or she moves jobs overseas, and pressure government to keep our borders open for cheap labor and H-1B foreign replacements.
The bribes the author is talking about is not tax incentives or cuts but actual bribes to local officials who also provide the labor and take a cut from them. My neighbor started a company in China and had to pay thousands in cash to the local officials. That's not competing on a fair level.
Well, certainly the inspirational teachers I am referring to would have strong discipline in their classrooms, you cannot teach without it. (I know, I lost control my first year of teaching, and never let discipline down again.)
Likewise I agree about morality. Without this, our society is in trouble across the board, and it does have to be present in the classroom too.
Globalism does not necessarily mean you forget who brought you to the dance. I agree, we need patriots, and we need to teach it in school.
We should not be hamstrung when it comes to competition. I believe the US has been standing up for a level playing field more and more. But the wage disparity will not disappear overnight. We can compete on other bases, such as better quality, better innovation, better work standards and faster turn around. Your neighbor did not need to start a company in China, in many trials, companies move overseas and regret it because things do not always work out. Better in most cases to keep jobs at home, move to cheaper states, and resolve the workers who are displaced with honor and help.
Too many Americans selling us out for their own benefit. Sometimes for peanuts.
It seems he's learned from Paul Craig Roberts that bashing his own party will bring him more notoriety and income - especially from the lamestream media.
Let's look at some of his quotes and the publications:
From Mother Jones Magazing (He's looking for a Conservative audience in Mother Jones?) LOL!
What is science telling us? The icebergs are melting. The polar ice caps are going away. The glaciers in the mountains are disappearing. Why is that happening? What are the facts? And once you’ve looked at the facts, then it seems to me that only a fool would not respond in some way to protect the environment.
I think that we are less safe today than we were three or four years ago.
From the NY Times Op Ed Page
Prestowitz is not a doomsayer, neither is he alone in his views. As president of the Economic Strategy Institute, a Washington think tank, he is in regular contact with the most influential US business leaders, several of whom -- Warren Buffet and George Soros included -- have taken steps to hedge their currency positions against the possibility of a cataclysmic plunge in the greenback.
It was in the part where the interviewer was soft-balling with Japan questions and Clyde Prestowitz presented a history that basically had the government saving the private sector:
... the United States Government actually did a lot of things. We established, for example, Sematech, a joint industry and U.S. Government-funded research and development organization to promote development of the U.S. semiconductor equipment industry...
.... People forget that because the success of the U.S. in the '90s is always attributed to the wonderful qualities of U.S. entrepreneurial capitalism, and certainly it had something to do with that, but it's wrong to dismiss the impact of the response of U.S. government policies through the challenges posed by Japan in the '80s."
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