horse of george

Hmmn... in China American tech companies can staff themselves with qualified engineers for about 750/month and there's an unending stream of them pouring out of Chinese universities - compare that to what, 9, 10 thousand/month in the States where there's not enough of them so staffing depends on immigration? In China these companies are also favoured with huge tax breaks, subsidies for any number of things, low construction costs, long term leases on property at ridiculously low rates - and what do the Chinese want in return, aside from the obvious economic boon? The technology. Of course, these migrating companies resist, more or less, install anti-theft procedures and protocols etc etc - but, really, how long can that last? And twenty years from now China has the factories, the skilled work force, the technology - don't need the States anymore, except as consumers, but what is a consumer that spends its life working at Walmart really worth come the end of the day? Besides, China has a billion potential consumers of its own just roiling about out there so maybe not even that's true. So then what?

I really have a hard time seeing how this all works out - granted, the issues are complex and would probably take a gifted person replete with the necessary knowledge and wisdom to hazard a credible guess - but regardless - instincts count for something and I just don't see how this all works out. Thank god though that the Obama administration spent its first year in office mucking about with a health insurance reform bill that will make America less competitive and more indebted to the Chinese. Great work people. But hey, as long as Nancy Pelosi and the membership of SAG are happy, how can things possibly go wrong?

[to counter my despair, popular academic and apparent hopeless optimist Joel Kotkin has this to say: 

“The America of 2050 may not stride the world like a hegemonic giant, but it will evolve into the one truly transcendent superpower in terms of society, technology and culture,” Mr. Kotkin gushes. “Its greatest power will be its identification with notions of personal liberty, constitutional protections and universalism.”

Given the viral finger-pointing and hand-wringing over what’s seen as America’s decline these days, Mr. Kotkin’s book provides a timely and welcome — if sometimes Panglossian — antidote. He builds his case for the prevalence of American exceptionalism on the nation’s adaptability, ingenuity, vast land and other resources and religiosity (and also on a less convincing argument that the country has rebounded before).

Those singularly American virtues collectively endow the country with sokojikara — the Japanese scholar Fuji Kamiya’s description of “a reserve power that allows it to overcome both the inadequacies of its leaders and the foibles of its citizens.”

If that remarkable reserve appears to be depleted these days, Mr. Kotkin, a distinguished presidential fellow at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., and a columnist for Forbes magazine, projects a resurgence in the next four decades — if the nation can overcome its ennui. Meanwhile, he asserts, China is aging more rapidly and its population may begin to decline before mid-century, and India remains impoverished and divided...]