http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/02/manufacturing_e.html
Posted on 03/24/2008 5:32:41 PM PDT by forkinsocket
We used to be the world's most skillful entrepreneurs and managers. Now we're laughingstocks. What happened?
The dollar plunged to new lows against foreign currencies this week. There are plenty of reasons for its plunge, but at the most basic level, the dollar's weakness reflects the world's collective, two-thumbs-down verdict about the ability of the United States—businesses, individuals, the government, the Federal Reserve—to manage the global financial system and the world's largest economy. Countries that outsourced their monetary policy by pegging domestic currencies to the dollar are having second thoughts. Kuwait last year detached the dinar from the dollar, and Qatar government officials last week said they were considering doing the same with their currency. International financiers are unnerved by the toxic combination of "misplaced assumptions about housing, a lack of necessary regulation and irresponsible use of debt with sophisticated financial instruments," said Ashraf Laidi, currency strategist at CMC Markets.
Dissing American financial management is an affront to national pride tantamount to standing in Rome and asking, loudly, if Italians are able to make pasta. The United States invented the concept and practice of running large, complex systems. Along with baseball and deep-frying, management is one of our great national pastimes. The world's first MBAs were awarded by pioneering yuppie factories such as the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. (Wharton's founding in 1881 was quickly followed by the world's first time-share summer houses in the Hamptons.) Henry Ford's revolutionary assembly line was the gold standard in global manufacturing for decades. Contemporary American institutions stand for excellence in managing everything from supply chains (Wal-Mart) to delivery services (Federal Express and UPS).
Americans' ability to manage complex systems has been the ultimate competitive advantage.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
“A graduate of Cornell University, Gross holds an A.M. in American history from Harvard University.”
Daniel Gross, not an economist.
I don’t think Americans are incompetent, but there’s a lot of competition out there. Nokia and Samsung are giving Motorola a run for its money. We’ve ceded shipbuilding to the Chinese, Japanese and Koreans. Infosys and Tata Consultancy are competing with Accenture and IBM.
We don’t need to be smug or alarmist, we just need to work smarter and harder.
The reason for this problem is egalitarianism.
No, we’re not going to go to global financial management, so stick it.
Of course they hate our weak dollar, no Americans vacation over there because it’s too expensive. Europeans come here for their vacations because they get a lot more bang for their buck. We can sell our manufactured goods over there very easily because they’re cheaper than their own, and on and on and on.
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/02/manufacturing_e.html
Yeah, if you’re out of ideas for your weekly column in Slate, you can always join the other members of the liberal croaking chorus and rundown your country for a few laughs.
Well, I can only speak from my limited view. In the last 10 years I have seen a world leading company managed into a bunch of bumbling fools. It would be funny, but they sign my check.
What is bad, is that we’re turning our own men away from robotics, controls, etc., at very young ages (starts with our pathological policies to cause fatherlessness and depopulation, teacher hatred against boys,...) and preferring only foreign students and women for such work. Most of the women don’t want to do it, so our business managers prefer foreign men.
I bet he had a chris-matthews-like thrill running up and down his leg while he wrote this death-to-america piece.
We are several generations ahead of the world when it comes to assimilating to the new robotics.
Resistance is futile.
True, and how many American companies make the very best of something whatever it might be? Very few.
Somewhere back in the 1970's American companies went to making cheaper mediocre products where the emphasis was only on cost. That is why moving the production to China went so fast.
A little self-reflective time is good for anyone.
Japan for instance publicly called their shoddy products a "National Shame" in the 1950's.
Oh, boo hoo! There are many reasons for the depreciation of the US dollar but “incompetence”? Hardly.
After WWII, America decided, unilaterally, to shoulder the burden of running the global economy, even when it wasn’t in its best interest to do so. It encouraged and protected international trade. It allowed itself to be the world’s export dumping ground without demanding other nations reciprocally open their markets to US exports. It allowed its factories to be shipped in toto to China and other nations. It allowed its advanced technology to be used by others, mostly gratis, for the ideal of lifting the world’s economic standard of living.
It became the world’s policeman since no one else could do the job.
Unlike every other superpower in history, it DID NOT extract tribute from its weaker neighbors. It did not expropriate the natural resources of other nations. It did not seize the richest and most strategic lands of others for concession.
Instead, we have the astonishing spectacle, never before seen in history, of the victor spending its treasury in rebuilding the vanquished. It also gives billions every year to nations that hate it and consistently vote against it in the UN.
These burdens are unprecedented in human history and is simply too great to bear for any single nation. It has kept the value of the US dollar much higher than where it should be, just to help the economies of other nations. Now that the standards of living between nations are leveling, it becomes more and more onerous for the US to be carrying this burden alone. IOW, the margins are getting tighter.
It is true that the welfare state, liberalism, political correctness, and multiculturalism have been tremendous multi-trillion dollar drains on the economy; but it is shared among all western nations, excluding Far East ones, who don’t have this Caucasian mental illness. Those that don’t subscribe to these lunacies, like Japan and the other Asian Tigers, face rapidly aging populations and below-replacement birth rates, giving identical results. Those in Western Europe, who have BOTH anchors, will never be able to carry their own weight, must less replace the US. In fact, their collapse will occur at least a decade before the US.
All this whining of the declining dollar and skyrocketing deficit obscures the fact, if push comes to shove, the US simply doesn’t need to honor its debts, if the alternative is economic collapse. This leaves debtors like China, holding a trillion dollars of useless electronic IOUs. They are trapped into continually propping up the US dollar since the alternative is revolution from the enraged masses who’ve los their life savings.
Edward:
Excellent retort.
It’s no wonder that foreign children write game engines and objects to parody gay characters like Daemia and Grunt (Quake 3) for free. That’s far from milling, turning, grinding and shaping a lot of parts, though. And whose posterior is all of the steel stock for our massive manufacturing coming out of these days? ...the mind of which importer’s journalist? After Charlie no longer needs our dollars so much, he probably won’t find it in his loving heart to spare an ingot for our lazy selves.
A mere half century ago we were hopelessly behind the Third Reich and Japan in that product line ~ even though they were defeated and flat on their backs.
Not only is it too expensive, but who wants to go abroad and be lectured about what laughingstocks we are by a bunch of smug eurosocialists (in love with the smell of their own farts) in the pub.
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