Subscribe"What made America much wealthier than the Asian nations in the first place?" Gomory asks. "We invested alongside our workers. Our workers dug ditches with backhoes. The workers in underdeveloped countries dug ditches with shovels. We had great big plants with a few people in them, which is the same thing. We knew how, through technology and investment, to make our workers highly productive. It wasn't that they went to better schools, then or now, and I don't know how much schooling it takes to run a backhoe."This is bullshit from an economic development standpoint, and the author's typification of this guy as some sort of MLK standing up to a corrupt establishment is distortionist crap.
"What made America much wealthier than the Asian nations in the first place?" Gomory asks. "We invested alongside our workers. Our workers dug ditches with backhoes. The workers in underdeveloped countries dug ditches with shovels. We had great big plants with a few people in them, which is the same thing. We knew how, through technology and investment, to make our workers highly productive. It wasn't that they went to better schools, then or now, and I don't know how much schooling it takes to run a backhoe."This is bullshit from an economic development standpoint
"The situation today is that the companies have discovered that using modern technology they can do all that overseas and pay less for labor and then import product and services back into the United States. So what we're doing now is competing shovel to shovel. The people in many countries are being equipped with as good a shovel or backhoe as our people have. Very often we are helping them make the transition. We're making it person-to-person competition, which it never was before and which we cannot win. Because their people will be paid a third, a quarter of what our people are paid. And it's unreasonable to think you can educate our people so well that they can produce four times as much in the United States."Obviously this is an oversimplification, but he's trying to convey ideas for laypersons, not economists. The essential point -- that by exporting technology, we equalize technological advantage, which makes the U.S. "lose" because it can't compete on labor costs -- is well worth considering. Some of us who work in industries where this is happening can see all to well that there is a long-term societal cost.
Still, it will take politicians of courage to embrace his ideas and act on them.I think I found your problem.
I ask Gomory what he would say to those who believe this is a just outcome: Americans become less rich, others in the world become less poor. That might be "a reasonable personal choice," he agrees. "But that isn't what the people in this country are being told. No one has said to us: 'You're probably a little too rich and these other folks are a little too poor. Why don't we even it out?' Instead, what we usually hear is: 'It's going to be good for everyone. In the long run we're going to get richer with globalization.'"Did anyone read this paragraph? Because it seems to go to the heart of the debate here. The marginal impoverishment of Western countries in conjunction with the substantial enrichment of the Third World might very well be a laudable goal, but shouldn't there be a public debate about it in politics? Shouldn't it be something we opt for as democracies rather than it simply sneaking in through lack of articulate alternatives?
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posted by Firas at 8:56 AM on April 20, 2007