Over the past few years, here and in other places, I’ve repeatedly argued that we are being fooled and mislead. Okay, that’s true in many arenas but today I’m referring to the mantra that we’ve heard from Republicans and Democrats alike that the solution to competing in the “global economy” is for people to get smarter. American workers are just too dumb, so say conservatives and liberals, and if they just upgraded their skills, presto, they’d become more employable.
Last year, Oded Shenkar published his book “The Chinese Century” (spotlighted here to the left in the blog’s list of recommended books). One of his basic points: pretty soon, China will begin to dominate in the industries where highly skilled work takes places like aircraft production and technology. China won’t just be the assembly location for clothes and low-end production anymore.
Why? WAGES, WAGES, WAGES. It is the main factor driving global production.
Today, The New York Times has a piece on the front-page of the business section entitled: “Outsourcing Is Climbing Skills Ladder.” Here are the first three paragraphs:
The globalization of work tends to start from the bottom up. The first jobs to be moved abroad are typically simple assembly tasks, followed by manufacturing, and later, skilled work like computer programming. At the end of this progression is the work done by scientists and engineers in research and development laboratories.
A new study that will be presented today to the National Academies, the nation’s leading advisory groups on science and technology, suggests that more and more research work at corporations will be sent to fast-growing economies with strong education systems, like China and India.
In a survey of more than 200 multinational corporations on their research center decisions, 38 percent said they planned to “change substantially” the worldwide distribution of their research and development work over the next three years — with the booming markets of China and India, and their world-class scientists, attracting the greatest increase in projects.
The study also contends that lower labor costs are not the major reason for hiring researchers overseas. I don’t buy that as a general proposition for the labor force in general. There is nothing wrong with people knowing more math and science. But, it is completely phony to tell people that the solution to future jobs for the board workforce is to get smarter.
Researcher jobs, or any number of jobs that would be considered “high skill,” are a small number in relative terms. Moreover, what is called “high skill” today is fairly slippery–does it mean anyone who touches a computer, which, in today’s world, can include pretty basic, routine tasks.
So, let the president talk about investing money in math and science education and let Democrats and liberals like Robert Reich wax eloquently about knowledge workers (do you ever wonder why it is that the people who promote these theories actually never lost a job to downward driven wages?). Until we can change the nature of competition so that it is not primarily based on the search for the lowest wages, people may get new skills and nice diplomas to hang on their walls but that won’t pay the grocery bills.
