together traced the downward trajectory of the American workforce:
1. The New Industrial State by J.K. Galbraith (1967)
2. The Work of Nations by Robert Reich (1991)
3. The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman (2005)
I'd like to expand on that suggestion here. I want to do it by quoting from the
conclusions of each book.
Galbraith:
" Knowledge for the intellectual is what skill is for the artisan and capital
for the businessman. In all, the instinct is to fear obsolescence. But he
intellectual is in a far better position to resist obsolescence than the
craftsman or businessman. The machine that replaces the craftsman is wholly
tangible. His only line of resistance is overt --- a strike or a sledgehammer
to smash the thing. Both encounter social disfavor. The out-of-date machine of
the businessman is equally objective. His modes of recourse --- to regulate or
suppress innovation --- are equally reprehensible. But the intellectual can
deny that there has been any change. The factors making for his alleged
obsolescence, he can insist, are the figment of an undisciplined imagination.
He can be a Luddite without violence and indeed without knowing it. It would
be surprising indeed were such opportunity to be unexploited."
Image: nuttakit / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Reich:"The direction we are heading is reasonably clear. If the future could be
predicted on the basis of trends already underway, laissez-faire cosmopolitanism
would become America's dominant economic and social philosophy. Left to unfold
on its own, the worldwide division of labor not only will create vast
disparities of wealth within nations but may also reduce the willingness of
global winners to do anything to reverse the trend toward inequality --- either
within the nation or without. Symbolic analysts (aka Galbraith's
"intellectuals"), who hold most of the cards in this game, could be confident of
'victory.' But what of the losers?
"We are presented with a rare historical moment in which the threat of
worldwide conflict seems remote and the transformations of economies and
technology are blurring the lines between nations. The modern nation-state...
is no longer what it once was: Vanishing is a nationalism founded upon the
practical necessities of economic interdependence within borders and security
against foreigners outside. There is thus an opportunity for us... to redefine
who we are, why we have joined together, and what we owe each other and the
other inhabitants of the world. The choice is ours to make. We are no more
slaves to present trends than to vestiges of the past. We can, if we choose,
assert that our mutual obligations as citizens extend beyond our economic
usefulness to one another, and act accordingly."
Image: graur razvan ionut / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Friedman:"I cannot tell any other society or culture what to say to its own children, but
I can tell you what I say to my own:The world is being flattened. I didn't
start it, and you can't stop it, except at a great cost to human development and
your own future. But we can manage it, for better or worse. If it is for
better..., then you and your generation must not live in fear of either
terrorists or of tomorrow.... You can flourish in this flat world, but it does
take the right imagination and the right motivation... the generation of
strategic optimists, the generation with more dreams than memories, the
generation that wakes up each morning and not only imagines that things can get
better but also acts on that imagination every day."
Image: digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Let me suggest that Reich and Friedman were either hopelessly idealistic or
incredibly cynical... depending upon whether or not they actually believed their
hortatory messages. Galbraith by contrast, writing more than 20 years before
Reich and some three and a half decades before Friedman, recognized that the
balanced, prosperous American national covenant of the 1950s ands 1960s was in
decline... and that only the intellectuals would emerge intact.
By 1990, Galbraith's intellectuals --- abandoning their sixties idealism for the
avarice of the Reagan era --- had morphed into Reich's symbolic analysts:
MBA/CEOs, investment bankers, media mavens, big-time lawyers, world-class
entertainers, etc. Reich --- either naively or cynically --- after filling 300+
pages with his gloomy picture of the rise of his symbolic analysts at the
expense of the drones in the service and manufacturing sectors, exhorts the
"winners" in this global race to the top to reach down and pull up their less
fortunate brothers and sisters.
Friedman is no different. He ends his cautionary tale of a flat world in which
the new "hot" business major is global supply chain management with his own
exhortation to the younger generation to make things better and better by acts
of imagination.
Meanwhile, during the four and a half decades between Galbraith's book and
today, the trend noted by Galbraith, traced by Reich,and depicted in full flower
by Friedman has been a widening of the gap between the super-rich and most of
the rest of humanity. During the Great Recession, which Friedman didn't
imagine, an estimated 2.5 million American jobs disappeared... some overseas,
some erased by increased efficiencies.
Two tenacious facts put the lie to Friedman's faith in imagination to pulls
through: First, unlike the technologies of the Industrial Revolution, the new
technologies of our Information Age wipe out more jobs than they create.
Second, the innovations imagined in America too often are operationalized in
India, China, Southeast Asia, and South America.
The profound question of 2012 is should we Americans embrace globalization and
guard against it? Is the way to win the globalization game to be more
imaginative than the competition... or to decline to play? Should our borders
be open, or should we be building that wall along the Rio Grande as rapidly as
possible?
Arguably, neither major party is proposing any suitable solution. The GOP
adamantly argues that taxing the wealthy more heavily will result in lack of job
creation. But the job market was far more vibrant in the Clinton era, when
taxes on the rich were higher, than now. Will the wealthy, if allowed to keep
their money, create American jobs? That doesn't seem very likely. More likely,
capital will continue to flow downhill, pursuing the lowest-priced, yet
competent labor markets. And that's not us.
The Dems want to create jobs: rebuilding the country's infrastructure, investing
in new technologies, supporting education. These are all ideas that have good
track records in times past. Certainly, the nation's infrastructure needs
rebuilding. This is not a long-run solution. But it puts people to work now
--- providing, as I pointed out about the San Francisco Bay bridge a few weeks
ago, the structures or their components aren't fabricated overseas. The new
infrastructure is a lasting benefit... a good investment. But the workers will
need to move on to other jobs, unless this revitalization becomes a perennial
series of successive projects.
New technologies? Well, the solar-panel company that failed recently, costing
the taxpayers half-a-billion bucks --- also noted elsewhere in this Blog --- is
not an encouraging tale. Not when, like the components of our national
infrastructure, the solar panels (or you name the technology) can be fabricated,
and is jobbed out, overseas.
Education? Not when the jobs are lacking and students graduate with massive
mortgages on their diplomas. Not when for-profit universities are permitted to
entice students into programs that don't lead to gainful employment, but which
divert billions in veterans' benefits and federal loans into these so-called
"free enterprises." Not when our great public, land-grant university systems
are starved by state legislatures. Not when private, non-profit universities
remain models of inefficiency in their delivery of instruction.
No simple solution suggests itself. And so long as we Americans are divided
along twin axises --- rich v. poor with a void where the vibrant middle class
used to be, and right v. left with a void where the political moderates users to
rule --- the chances of our reaching a national consensus are slim to none.
Why is this the great American tragedy? Because it isn't so important which
direction we go --- into full fledged competition on the playing field of the
flat earth or behind high walls of protectionism --- as it is essential that we
reach some consensus and commit as a nation to some such plan.
9/11/2001 forged a rare moment of national unity. George Bush and Dick Cheney
lacked either the patriotism or perhaps --- yes --- the imagination to take full
advantage of that moment. Ten years later, it may be too late for either an
Obama or a Hilary Clinton, for a Rick Perry or a Rick Santorum to articulate and
sell such a plan, and with it to forge a consensus and energize a new national
agenda.
But, perhaps, a miracle is possible in 2012. After all, the Cold War ended
without a nuclear exchange; the South Africans and the Northern Irish managed to
find their way to relative peace without a genocide; the Arab Spring persists,
at least for the moment. Miracles do sometimes happen. So perhaps Reich and Friedman will be vindicated... against all the odds.
[Source: Wikimedia Commons http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Berlinermauer.jpg]
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