The United States government does one thing well— and one thing only. It can spend money like a Doberman can eat a prime rib roast. The U.S. government spends money, not with simple commitment, but with unbridled enthusiasm. So, today, when the Feds took over Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, we could all rest comfortably in the knowledge that a huge portion of the mortgage mess would be alleviated by the infusion of good old-fashioned government greenbacks. Never mind that those greenbacks would eventually need to come from inflation-generating government printing presses, or Chinese lenders, or that kind of surreal and mysterious metaphysical transfer system that defers the whole wad of cash into the future, and places it on the backs of our children and grandchildren. For the time being, this particular economic crisis proved that it could be smoothed-over by the one thing the government is good at— spending money.
I wish that all of our problems could be amenable to the same solution. Specifically, I wish that the energy crisis could be solved with big government money. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Pulitzer Prize winning writer and brilliant thinker, Thomas Friedman, is proposing that our energy problems can be solved by something he is calling, the ET revolution. ET stands for Energy Technology. He sees the ET revolution unfolding much like the IT revolution in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when home computers and the Internet transformed the way that we gained and shared information. Friedman’s analogy is interesting, but I see a drawback that might prove to be a deal-breaker. The fact is that 20 to 30 years ago, the majority of the best scientific and engineering minds in the world were doing their thinking and working right here in the United States. Not so anymore. Just like the Nazi regime in Germany drove away the best German scientific thinkers in the 1930s, and pushed many of them across the sea to our shores, so has the Bush administration has pushed scientific thought out of the United States and sent much of it across the sea to Asia. I don’t mean to imply that the Bush administration is the equivalent of Nazism. No way. But George W. Bush and his cronies have created an almost medieval, Spanish Inquisitional, modern Dark Ages where it comes to science— stifling research and even simple discourse on scientific subjects ranging from stem cell therapies to global warming.
Today, our public educational system is a pathetic failure in the teaching of language and mathematics, but it fails even more spectacularly in the teaching of science. Only 18% of high schoolers take even one science class during their years in the classroom. If (as the Republican presidential candidates are proposing) supernatural divine creation is inserted into the school curriculum, scientific learning will suffer even more. So the question is this— if an ET revolution is going to save us from energy catastrophe, then how will the technology (the T in ET) come about without a strong community of scientists and engineers? The answer is that the ET revolution will take place where science has now found a home. Unfortunately, that place is Asia, not the United States.
Showing posts with label Thomas Friedman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Thomas Friedman. Show all posts
Monday, September 8, 2008
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
What You May Not Know About Outsourcing
Here’s the question for the day. If you managed a business and needed to hire people you could depend on to help make you successful, would you prefer someone with a poor education who demanded a high salary, or would you prefer someone with a better education who would work for a lower wage? A question similar to this was posed to me (as part of a group discussion) by John Sculley, past CEO of PepsiCo and Apple Computer.
We were sailing on the same ship together with a final destination of Bombay, India. From Bombay, my wife and I were flying back to the U.S., and Sculley was going on to Bangalore to have a firsthand look at the outsource-phone-center capital of the world. He explained that there were five reasons why American companies should outsource to India, and low wages was down at the bottom on that list. Here’s Sculley’s five reasons to outsource.
1. A better educated pool of people from which to hire. This is especially true for engineering and technical jobs since five of the six best scientific schools on earth are in India.
2. Eliminates office politics. There seems to be something in the culture of India, probably related to Hinduism, that inhibits people from the backstabbing ploys like credit stealing and rumor mongering which you see so often in the American workplace.
3. Outsourcing breaks the tyranny of the Human Resource department. (I loved this reason in particular. You’d need to have firsthand experience in an American corporation to fully appreciate this).
4. Prevents union and other organized labor problems.
5. Low wages. Scully said that this advantage is only temporary. With American wages declining and Indian wages rising rapidly, wage parity will be achieved, probably within ten years.
John Sculley was of the opinion that outsourcing to India is so beneficial to the productivity of an American company that any CEO would be remiss for not, at least, considering this option. And in his book, “The Earth is Flat,” writer and thinker, Thomas Friedman, claimed that the Intel Corporation has positioned itself to thrive for another 50 years without hiring any American workers. That’s not to say that Intel won’t hire Americans if they have the education and work ethic, but Intel is not willing to tie itself down to an all-American workforce. I know that other major corporations have a similar mind-set, even though they want to stay under the radar for PR reasons.
American patriots want you to believe that all of this is driven by the rise of China and India as economic powers. What nobody talks about is the fact that— for the first time in modern world history— the next generation of Americans will NOT be better educated than the generation previous to them. Within the developed world, the unbroken record of each generation improving on what they inherited— that record has now been broken in the United States of America. Corporation heads are not stupid. They know this and acknowledge it even if the politicians avoid it.
It’s another election year. Here’s a tip for evaluating candidates. If a politician tells us that they will keep American jobs from going overseas, he or she is delusional. And if a politician says that they will bring outsourced jobs back from overseas, they are telling you an outright lie.
We were sailing on the same ship together with a final destination of Bombay, India. From Bombay, my wife and I were flying back to the U.S., and Sculley was going on to Bangalore to have a firsthand look at the outsource-phone-center capital of the world. He explained that there were five reasons why American companies should outsource to India, and low wages was down at the bottom on that list. Here’s Sculley’s five reasons to outsource.
1. A better educated pool of people from which to hire. This is especially true for engineering and technical jobs since five of the six best scientific schools on earth are in India.
2. Eliminates office politics. There seems to be something in the culture of India, probably related to Hinduism, that inhibits people from the backstabbing ploys like credit stealing and rumor mongering which you see so often in the American workplace.
3. Outsourcing breaks the tyranny of the Human Resource department. (I loved this reason in particular. You’d need to have firsthand experience in an American corporation to fully appreciate this).
4. Prevents union and other organized labor problems.
5. Low wages. Scully said that this advantage is only temporary. With American wages declining and Indian wages rising rapidly, wage parity will be achieved, probably within ten years.
John Sculley was of the opinion that outsourcing to India is so beneficial to the productivity of an American company that any CEO would be remiss for not, at least, considering this option. And in his book, “The Earth is Flat,” writer and thinker, Thomas Friedman, claimed that the Intel Corporation has positioned itself to thrive for another 50 years without hiring any American workers. That’s not to say that Intel won’t hire Americans if they have the education and work ethic, but Intel is not willing to tie itself down to an all-American workforce. I know that other major corporations have a similar mind-set, even though they want to stay under the radar for PR reasons.
American patriots want you to believe that all of this is driven by the rise of China and India as economic powers. What nobody talks about is the fact that— for the first time in modern world history— the next generation of Americans will NOT be better educated than the generation previous to them. Within the developed world, the unbroken record of each generation improving on what they inherited— that record has now been broken in the United States of America. Corporation heads are not stupid. They know this and acknowledge it even if the politicians avoid it.
It’s another election year. Here’s a tip for evaluating candidates. If a politician tells us that they will keep American jobs from going overseas, he or she is delusional. And if a politician says that they will bring outsourced jobs back from overseas, they are telling you an outright lie.
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