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Apr
25
The Cleveland of China
Filed Under economy
I took my son to CCD the other day. My wife was busy working on something at the house, so we didn’t do our usual Wednesday night date while our son was in his class. (The grandparents always do a good job taking care of the littlest one, if we don’t bring him along with us).
I stopped by the local bookstore and was looking at the various magazines. For some reason, the current edition of World Affairs Journal caught my eye — especially intriguing was an article by P.J. O’Rourke titled “The Cleveland of Asia. A Journey Through China’s Rust Belt.” A limited abstract is available online, but a subscription is required for the full article.
The thing that struck me is that there is great wealth being created in China these days. They are probably comparable to the way America was earlier in the 20th century when we were developing ways create and sell the items we produced. Doesn’t it seem strange to think that Russia and China are now havens for millionaires? However, we must not forget that China is still not free, despite their openness to international and domestic trade.
I’ve been thinking that we better find a solution to our educational problem. Many of the shootings in Chicago and Gary are probably directly linked to failures of students to learn, of parents to encourage learning, and the educational system to figure out a way to reach students in ways that will keep their attention. If someone doesn’t have the skills to survive in the mainstream economy, they’re going to end up working in the underground economy that causes so many problems in the urban core.
If we don’t keep learning, America is going to fall behind as more and more work and jobs — including intellectual work — are sent overseas.
Widgets and industrial items aren’t the only projects being sent across the ocean.
Debt collection, according to a New York Times article, is the latest thing to be sent overseas. (My internet can’t access the NYT right now, otherwise I’d link to the article). Even the service industry — such as legal work — can be sent to Indian lawyers who work during our night hours so that projects can be completed for the next morning for Americans returning to their offices.
Outsourcing has become such a trend that the Indians are outsourcing their work to the Philippines in an effort to arbitrage and make a profit — in much the way that our outsourcing companies have done.
Why can’t Americans seem to catch the entrepreneurial spirit that seems to be sweeping across Asia? Why does it always seem that Americans want a handout — usually financed by some corporate tax that is just passed along to consumers or that causes companies to seek to move to jurisdictions with lesser taxes?
Don’t think high businesses taxes aren’t causing businesses to flee — London might overtake New York as the business capital because of favorable tax rates and business regulations.
It seems that we’ve become lazy and weak with our wealth. We’re like wastrels content to spend our time living in our parents’ basement because we’re too afraid to take a risk at the change of making something of ourselves. We’re too caution and too inclined to turn to the government to provide for us. We ask our government to give us what we need, instead of figuring out ways to make our own destiny.
We’ve become like Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian with all of our excess that is provided by our rich nation. We’ve been stunted by spoils of the hard work and successes of prior generations.
Sure, we’re beautiful, but when push comes to shove, there isn’t much behind our beauty except for a well manicured hand extended out waiting for the big government mommy and daddy to give us our allowance so that we won’t need to strain ourselves working or otherwise improving ourselves. We must ask ourselves who is going to finance all of our desires if all of our jobs are sent overseas because the American educational system isn’t teaching students enough to compete against the billions of people in Asia just waiting to do the work we won’t — or maybe can’t — do.
We need to catch fire again with an optimistic “can do” spirit, instead of looking and waiting for the government to do for us what we should be doing for ourselves.
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6 Responses to “The Cleveland of China”
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Hey Chris, this is a great article. It drives me bonkers how people take zero initiative these days to better themselves! I’m 23, married, I own a home, and I work for the federal government. My wife is 25 and teaches for IUN. A lot of our friends are doing exactly what you said — living in their parents’ basements. I joined the Army and got my head-start in life through them and that is paying for most of my education.
A lot of people in my bachelor’s degree program could hardly write proper English. It’s crazy! Young adults and middle-aged adults alike, poor grammar and sentence structure across the board. But most of them passed with A’s and B’s and some went on for Master’s degrees. Our educational standards have certainly been compromised. Today’s M.B.A. is yesterday’s B.S.B.A. I’d be willing to bet that in 10-12 years we’ll see a lot of folks with Ph.D.’s in business from colleges such as Kaplan, University of Phoenix, etc. Not that it is wrong to get a degree from one of those institutions, but a Ph.D. likely will not carry the same prestige in the business world as it does today. I might be wrong, I hope so… .
Hi Dan,
We have to be careful as a nation because we are losing our edge to other nations that seem to value education and learning more than we do.
However, the one thing that distinguishes us from other counties is the fact that we are one of the most innovative nations in the world. The top 1% of thinkers in America always impact the world in great ways — even if the fruit of our ideas end up being assembled and manufactured somewhere else.
If you are willing to work hard, you are almost unlimited in your ability to succeed. Of course, it takes hard work and many business people fail because the odds of failure are often great — but with great risk comes great reward.
The problem these days is that too many people don’t want to take a risk and want everything handed to them. I admit that sometimes I’d like to just have everything be handed to me. But, if we’re all sitting back and waiting for someone else to feed us, who is going to be doing the work that needs to be done in order to make it happen?
I pretty excited to see dan join us in the regular daily debate and conversations here in NW Indiana. I guess we were all needing a shot in the arm, and our commenting was showing some weakness.
As for your post, Chris I do agree that we as a nation are getting pretty fat and sassy and there may not be a model that will let us all watch the rest of the world work, while we recreate and make the big bucks.
But, there is that positive side to me, the side that believes so much in the experiment that is our nation … our chief export as a country is FREEDOM. Freedom to disagree. Freedom to worship or not. Freedom to associate. We need to go back to our roots and export more Freedom.
I for one would suggest we drop the Cuban embargo, let’s export them FREEDOM.
I for one would not support a boycott of the Olympics because we should export them FREEDOM and be there to talk to them about it.
Amen. We need to stick to our Constitution and remember why we wrote it in the first place. Amen on the Olympics, I’d love to see a post on that too
I did start a couple posts on the Olympics, mostly because local blogger Kevin Tracy was screaming for a boycott over Tibet. Using the Olympics for blog traffic and Olympics 2008 - China and Freedom
I was a huge Olympics fan as a kid, and I was destroyed when we foolishly boycotted the Moscow Games. So, I want none of that.
Hi Steve,
I grabbed you from the Akismet filter — the program holds comments with links. (I like the links, so feel free to include them).
I heard something funny today. Chinese officials discovered one of their companies was making “Free Tibet” flags for the export market. It’s ironic that protesters are flying Chinese-made protest flags.
Of course, they’re making our flags also …