Darfot, RE: "there's no way the US can be competitive with China or India"
I think you underestimate the capabilities and hardwork of Americans, the workers, our systems, our efficiencies in our systems, our infrastructure, and even our government is much, much more efficient (even if you can't believe this last item, it's very true.)
Our universities spawn RND for new innovations.
We get to the next level, so do workers' wages.
New innovation, higher margins creates higher wages.
However, I do believe we need to seriously get aggressive with getting more middle class into investor class, and fast too, because if wages do come under assault (and I believe it'll be entry level middle class that comes under assault - catalog call centers, etc.), their incomes need to come from several sources - wages and capital, not just wages, in order to protect themselves more. Wage growth < investment growth. There needs to be some type of government sponsored savings program for the middle class and poor. If America's entry-level middle class and poor, could turn into world capital investors, things could go well for them.
As far as middle-class and up, we're already seeing a tightening labor supply overseas that's headed this way. And since there are less people in Silicon Valley than during the boom, there will actually be more competition for the good people here.
But I also think we need to get more competitive internally, otherwise we are going to struggle say in a decade (*). Specifically, our schools are in seriously bad shape, i.e. currently, IIT Indians learn differential calculus in their 8th grade and integral calculus in 9th grade, while our schools don't teach calculus until the senior year. We need to bump up the math by two years.
(*) I think after around 2 to 3 downturns, we'll see China & India dump a substantial number of trained people onto the market. They graduate something like 1 million students per year each. We graduate something like 300,000. After ten years, that's 20 million hungry talented, trained people looking for work. Having said that all that, the Indian people that have done some great innovating tend to be the IIT types, and there's only 2,000 of those gems per year. Our eng schools bump out around 10,000 at that quality level. We really should be bumping out a lot more than that, scientists and PhDs, to get more innovations.
Some of the schools overeas are rather fraudulent though, so one has to read the 1 million with a grain of salt. But the conclusion is, the million per year are really more of the entry-level positions - they are the ones taking up all of our older call center jobs (I believe JC Penneys catalog call center, etc. etc.). So the assault is happening really at the call center level, while supply is becoming tight upward.
But overtime, more and more overseas people will become even more trained. That means we need to move up teh food chain here with more innovation. Only way to do that is thru RND & universities. That's why I think we've got only 10 years at most to get our schools producing the next order of innovations, which means changing our grade schools to be more globally competitive so more students go to colleges here and become scientists, so we get more good RND stuff.
Regards,
Amy J |
