Don't focus on engineering alone. If good business today were about creating something that can be well defined, everything would be made in Asia.
However, the difference between U.S. economy (and some other western countries) and most other economies, is that people are able to:
- Develop things that nobody thought of before
- Develop new sciences
- Networking, distributing information quickly
I'm not impressed by people who graduate and are excellent in everything that was written in their books. However, I am impressed with those, that create something unorthodox, and achieve a better result.
In Denmark, we have examined the performances of children of immigrants from arabic countries with native Danes, and found out that the intelligence of these children is lower. This cannot be explained by genetics, and it also cannot be explained by the background of the parents (ref. "Freakonomics"). Until further notice, the conclusion has been, that it's the culture, that prevents the children from being stimulated. In order to fix this, you don't need rocket scientists, but soft sciences.
USA didn't grow powerful just because you got technology, it's very much about culture, population density, mobility, market size etc. Who cares if a product was developed by a guy i china or a girl in India, as long as you own it and you're the key to this product in the market?
China can copy several of these: they are very open minded to new things, they have a huge market etc., but it will take many years to learn everything necessary to get at the knowledge level where USA is now. Since they are so many people in one country, the cultural interchange with other countries is smaller per capita than elsewhere. Also, science shows that bilingual people get better brains as adults and degrade more slowly when they get old. Freakonomics says, that abortion is the reason for reduced criminality in USA. How will the 1-child per family policy in China affect sociology? We don't know.
China has a lot of pollution right now. Much of their production is based on the tax rules in other countries. For instance, if you want to create something out of oil in Europe, you would pay tax for the oil. Instead, you can have it produced in China and get it transported to Europe, which will cost more oil, but less tax, and the total price will be smaller. Also, polluting is much easier in China.
The Kyoto agreement is really silly here - in Denmark, our powerplants typically exploit 70-90% of the energy in coal, whereas brandnew coal plants in China exploit 30% of the energy. Anyway, Denmark reduces energy consumption. This way, we have less imports on fuel, and can spend our money on product manufactured in China instead, using more oil than we would otherwise do... huh?
China is very interested in a new international CO2 agreement, if it would mean that we would pay China to get more effective coal plants. Now, what would that mean? Worldwide planned government support for chinese economy as a result of attempts to reduce CO2 emissions?
Confused? World economy is very much about government decisions. Right now it is very convenient to put our pollution in china and let the english speaking people in india take the phone calls we all hate to take. And frankly, it's boring to write yet another business application like we did in the past 20 years, it's much more fun to solve the real problems in the world.
Right now, Denmark is one of the best growth economies in Europe. However, because of the language barriers, there isn't much migration over the borders. So how do you get effective growth without adding people?
- You convert a group of programmers to a mix of consultants (who identify problems to solve) and project leaders for people in other countries (east europe, india, china whatever).
- You make all communication electronic. All communication between public institutions is electronic, invoices to public administration cannot be delivered on paper any more, cash will probably soon no longer be able to buy anything more than $15000, nobody has a checkbook any more, pay receipts are now no longer being sent on paper, only via the internet. My own personal printer has been out of order for a couple of months, but I don't miss it because paper isn't something I use frequently.
- Bank accounts are now mandatory. You cannot get your pay in cash any more. You cannot get a check if some authorities owe you money, you have to specify a bank account.
- Electronic registration is centralized. It's one SQL statement in one database if you want to know how much paracetamol was bought yesterday in all pharmacies in this country.
- Communes (city administrations) are merged. We had a merger in about 1970, and now we merge again. This effectively quarters the number of mayors in this country, quarters the number of city council members etc.
- We remove one layer of administration. Earlier we had three layers, all with elections and tax systems: State, Amt, Commune. Now we will effectively only have two: State, commune.
- Digital signatures are given to everybody, and you use them to access your personal data on authority websites, log in to your phone company's website, send signed letters or contracts etc. They are treated as normal signatures.
- English is introduced more and more at universities to make international interchange easier. We basically eradicate Danish as a university language, which will, in the long run, also introduce more English at high school level.
Much of the technology here is developed in India and east europe. But we're the one getting the infrastructure from it.
All of this can only be possible because everybody who can read in this country also owns a PC. You cannot do most of these things in China, because the majority of the population are not very good at using PCs. As far as I know, it's still only 200-250 mio. people in China, that have gotten properly out of poverty, and even they have a lot to learn, still.
One of the biggest problems for producers of advanced hearing aids is to educate the chinese about what is actually possible today. They have the money to buy it, but they don't know what is possible. |
