Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven
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| Sunny Days in Heaven Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven |
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Friday, April 26, 2002 Whither thou goest? A column at Townhall.com by Paul Craig Roberts here, discusses something I've been wondering about for some time despite my strong sympathy for free markets - what happens when we export all our manufacturing and now research and development work to the third world? Where are there going to be jobs for Americans outside of civil service and retail? We move our jobs abroad to China and Mexico and get lower prices in return for our TV's, shoes, microchips, software, and linen - but where are we going to get the money to buy all those goods as our real wages continually decline, also? I don't know enough about economics to offer any hopeful suggestions. Many have mentioned that it now appears to take two wage earners to afford a decent middle-class lifestyle where 40 years ago, one man in a good blue collar job could lift his whole family up from the ranks of working class. For all I know, the market may make it all work out better than anybody could anticipate. We should never underestimate the power of American men (yes, it is men who exercise the most initiative to get money) to find newer and more clever means of acquisition of lucre. I remain leery, though. I sometimes wonder if our economic future is going to be death by a thousand cuts. Small hemorhages that never amount to an emergency but eventually create one. Still, for all the vaunted cleverness of the various Asian professionals - we rarely witness true innovations from Japan or China or Korea. We see productivity, clever improvement of designs and ideas, but rarely do we see paradigm shifts or startling breakthroughs in wholly new areas of research. The kind of thinking or world view (forward looking optimism) that produces original ideas and leaps of imagination seem to be missing from many cultures for the last few hundred years or longer. America doesn't have a monopoly on innovation and creativity, but it currently does have a dynamism which is unmatched elsewhere in the world. How long that can last is anybody's guess. posted by Mark Butterworth | 12:52 PM | |
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