What what WHAT????!!!

[Finnster]

Originally Posted by PBO

Greed undermines capitalism

IDK, seems greed is essential to capitalism. I see it more as an agnostic force that needs to be harness and directed effectively, but of course that is easier said than done.

As far as China goes, I was reading an interesting article on tech jobs and the US a little while ago written by Andy Grove, one of Intel's co-founder's and longtime leader/Ceo/etc. Longer article, but a good read.


Basically what he was saying its not so much just a function of labor costs that has lead to China's success (altho undoubtedly an advantage) but a large range of American policy failures and misplaced devaluation of manufacturing and factory work.

A lot of praise (and captial) goes start-ups an technological development, but the major shift America has seen (and not cared so much about) is the movement of the next phase of work, the scale-up and production, has been moved out of the country. By his estimates, there are 10 jobs produced for every one start-up job. By ignoring the scale up work, we are ignoring 90% of the jobs. In turn, we are getting very low returns in jobs for the money that we invest in job creation and innovation.

China gladly takes them, and there is massive support by the gov't to bring those jobs there. Grove advocates a much more protectionist stance by the US, and re-alignment of priorities of tax, trade and business laws to favor job creation at home, and disincentivize businesses to ship the jobs overseas. There is also a critical clock that is ticking, where we are losing our knowledge base and experience doing these things, and venture capitalists are rising in China that will eventually threaten the innovators here in the US.

Overall, I think we have been a bit blind to the game China is playing. Currency manipulation, massive govt subsidies, as well as widespread social repression, censorship and propaganda to squelch dissent and strenghten the ruling govt.

I don't think we can win on the pure labor costs. Not only are we more developed and less overcrowded, we are a democratic and free people who would never tolerate the working conditions and oppression that goes on in China to support their strategy. That's not to say there is not a third way, and we may need to question our priorities, as well as beliefs in free and open trade when our "partners" are not playing by the same rules and leaving us as highminded chumps. Every recovery we've had after a recession in the last 20 years has been longer and slower than the last as there are fewer good jobs to return to.


Sry for the wall-o-text, ran way longer than I meant to...