Go be pissed off at someone else
Thomas Friedman is arguing for Arab reform so that the elite in that region will see that the bad guys making their lives difficult are not Americans; they’re Filipinos, Indians, and Mainland Chinese.
… the Arab world will have to look clearly at the fact that China, India, Sri Lanka and the Philippines — all the countries that provide maid service for the Saudi and other Arab ruling elites and manual labor for their construction — have leapt so far ahead with their own development that they are now taking good jobs away from America.
The whole premise of promoting reform by taking on a lower profile and allowing Arab countries to see how far they’ve fallen behind other developing nations is a good one, but I suppose no commentator could forgive themselves if they missed out on blaming these countries for ‘taking good jobs away from America’.
I enjoyed The Lexus and The Olive Tree, but give it a rest. China, India, and the Philippines have something the US hasn’t – lower costs of production (sweatshop conditions or not). Unless the US suddenly lowers its costs and standards of living dramatically, its corporations enforce labour standards in all their wholly-owned and subcontracted factories, or US citizens boycott all products and services that are not ‘made in the USA’, I think ‘good jobs’ are going to continue to be ‘taken away’ and sent where the price is right.
Yes, there was a time when even Japan was “lower cost of production”. And then it took the lead in several technologies.
Sooner or later the quality of R&D coming out of these places (.cn, .in or .ph) will be equal (if not better) than that of the US (West, Japan etc.). And that is what Friedman is been talking about in the last couple of stories – That US needs to encourage more American to go into science and technology related fields.
For any future technology to work you need 1) Large number of researchers involved in that field and 2) Cheap enough labor to produce products out of that research and 3) A big enough market to test and absorb the products. Now, which countries satisfy all these – India and China and to a certain extent Philippines.
It’s always struck me how so many of them like to “blame asia first” because it’s so much more convenient to. Expounding on the magic of the free market, and then retracting it when they realise they’re not benefiting from the free market.. very classic.
I wish it was that simple.
The US economy has gotten incredibly twisted. The minimum wage has to be about $7 an hour so that five people can afford to live in a one bedroom apartment in a big city. In many families, both the husband and wife started working. This pushed up housing prices. The median home price in San Francisco are $800,000, with a small two bedroom house barely above the standad not to be condemned and in a drug neighborhood is $500,000.
Now they have kids, and the wife can not afford to quit her job to make the house payments, and they have to pay for someone to watch the children during the day. When the kids reach about ten, they watch themselves. This is the sometimes the result.
Ah, the American Dream…
Yep, that's america for us … "rich" yet considered greedy. Gotta get a degree just to afford the day-care. And once the kids are out of day-care, you gotta send your parents to the "death-camp" old folks home.
Terry, mdmhvonpa, Singapore's in a very similar situation. These days you need at least an Honours degree to get anywhere (I'm exaggerating a little bit, but it's true for the civil service). Now the government wants to be the hub for everything high-tech and 'cutting edge'. The thing is these good jobs are better sent overseas, and USians should focus of higher-skilled, 'only in America' (for now) jobs.
That's economic globalisation for you.