The issue is that we are facing a society where fewer people create true value than ever before. That means that the old paradigms of the economists must change. Manufacturing may not have that great a value, but it did employ people who had little other than hands and a trainable brain to the table. Clearly our educational system is not up to the challenge. In fact the Dewey system we suffer under, one structured to deliver trainable but limited workers, must be abandoned, and people must face a reality that just getting by may not be enough.
As Krugman states:
First, what’s driving the turnaround in our manufacturing trade? The main answer is that the U.S. dollar has fallen against other currencies, helping give U.S.-based manufacturing a cost advantage. A weaker dollar, it turns out, was just what U.S. industry needed...So while we still have a deeply troubled economy, one piece of good news is that Americans are, once again, starting to actually make things. And we’re doing that thanks, in large part, to the fact that the Fed and the Obama administration ignored very bad advice from right-wingers — ideologues who still, in the face of all the evidence, claim to know something about creating prosperity.
Just making autos may not make the future. One need just look at the names and affiliations on the many papers in bio tech and one sees a trend to the growth from China. That may be the canary in the mine shaft, a tell tale omen that the value creating jobs in that area are not safe here. I remember Russia and Poland ten years ago, with the lasting remnants of manufacturing and re-manufacturing. Old building where people were employed doing repetitive tasks remaking a DC motor or the like. Little value created.
Now in a strange way this also ties in with some comments on Brooks in the Guardian. They have reviewed his recent work. They state:
But what's important about Brooks is not so much that he acts British, but that he thinks British. His new book, The Social Animal: A Story of How Success Happens, is steeped in the anti-rationalist philosophical reflections of the British Enlightenment. And this is no ordinary book: even before publication this week it has become, according to Times columnist Rachel Sylvester, "the must-read text for politicians searching for a new prism through which to examine the apparently intractable challenges of social immobility, school dropout rates, welfare dependency and crime". Education secretary Michael Gove believes it contains vital clues for turning around failing schools; universities minister David Willetts reckons it may help define modern Conservatism...Brooks hails British rather than French Enlightenment thinkers as the guys who really understood what makes the social animal tick. While Voltaire, Condorcet and Descartes used reason to confront superstition and feudalism, thinkers across the Channel – Brooks cites Burke, Hume and Adam Smith – thought it unwise to trust reason. Rather, and here Brooks quotes Hume with approval: "Reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions."
Brooks most powerful comment is:
Perhaps the fact that you're a self-described socialist will appeal to Ed Miliband, I suggest to Brooks. "Yes, but my socialism doesn't value state over society. It favours a more communitarian style of politics. The point is to ensure that people from different classes feel united in a common enterprise.
You see Brooks is Canadian by birth, which explains everything. The communitarian comment above is the most telling. It is the antithesis of the individualism of the Founders, the rejection of many of the class based structures of a British society. The statement of lack of faith in the rationalism of the French is a Burkean statement of the rejection of the French Revolution. This has been a continual battle as to what the cause of the French Revolution was, a Marxian cause due to the oppression of the workers, or otherwise.
De Tocqueville has written a brilliant piece worth re-looking on the issue, and Rationalism has its merits. Hume and friends always had their heads somewhat in the clouds. Reason has merit, substantial merit, and it is what drives us as humans. Remember if all else fails, look at the facts.
The English cannot really learn anything from the Americans, the cultures are diverging, for England is a class based society where class is based upon a blood line. Even France rid itself of that plague. The US has some semblance of class, but it is diffuse and can be lost or attained. Whether through money or fame, education or politics, there are classes in the US but as such they are all too often ephemeral.
So what is the connection between Krugman and Brooks, other than the Times? The connection seems to be a total disjointed understanding of the American reality. That Americans will invent, create, evolve, and as a result the need for manufacturing is akin to the need for small farms, or the need for ditch diggers. In the latter case the Irish and Chinese who built the railroad and who were equally despised by the existing class of English, have somehow become the elements of what has moved upward. Again just look at the names on so many of the papers in genomics. That is the future of the United States, and that is what we should be supporting, not fender benders in Detroit.
Posts
