Time for USA to Reboot - Does the same apply here??

martin1016

New York Times artcle that raises several points which could be just as relevant to good old Ireland. I suppose you could just replace GM with Irish Construction Inc, question is can Obama do it and can our own power players do it here?

Time to Reboot America
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

I had a bad day last Friday, but it was an all-too-typical day for America.

It actually started well, on Kau Sai Chau, an island off Hong Kong, where I stood on a rocky hilltop overlooking the South China Sea and talked to my wife back in Maryland, static-free, using a friend’s Chinese cellphone. A few hours later, I took off from Hong Kong’s ultramodern airport after riding out there from downtown on a sleek high-speed train — with wireless connectivity that was so good I was able to surf the Web the whole way on my laptop.

Landing at Kennedy Airport from Hong Kong was, as I’ve argued before, like going from the Jetsons to the Flintstones. The ugly, low-ceilinged arrival hall was cramped, and using a luggage cart cost $3. (Couldn’t we at least supply foreign visitors with a free luggage cart, like other major airports in the world?) As I looked around at this dingy room, it reminded of somewhere I had been before. Then I remembered: It was the luggage hall in the old Hong Kong Kai Tak Airport. It closed in 1998.

The next day I went to Penn Station, where the escalators down to the tracks are so narrow that they seem to have been designed before suitcases were invented. The disgusting track-side platforms apparently have not been cleaned since World War II. I took the Acela, America’s sorry excuse for a bullet train, from New York to Washington. Along the way, I tried to use my cellphone to conduct an interview and my conversation was interrupted by three dropped calls within one 15-minute span.

All I could think to myself was: If we’re so smart, why are other people living so much better than us? What has become of our infrastructure, which is so crucial to productivity? Back home, I was greeted by the news that General Motors was being bailed out — that’s the G.M. that Fortune magazine just noted “lost more than $72 billion in the past four years, and yet you can count on one hand the number of executives who have been reassigned or lost their job.”

My fellow Americans, we can’t continue in this mode of “Dumb as we wanna be.” We’ve indulged ourselves for too long with tax cuts that we can’t afford, bailouts of auto companies that have become giant wealth-destruction machines, energy prices that do not encourage investment in 21st-century renewable power systems or efficient cars, public schools with no national standards to prevent illiterates from graduating and immigration policies that have our colleges educating the world’s best scientists and engineers and then, when these foreigners graduate, instead of stapling green cards to their diplomas, we order them to go home and start companies to compete against ours.

To top it off, we’ve fallen into a trend of diverting and rewarding the best of our collective I.Q. to people doing financial engineering rather than real engineering. These rocket scientists and engineers were designing complex financial instruments to make money out of money — rather than designing cars, phones, computers, teaching tools, Internet programs and medical equipment that could improve the lives and productivity of millions.

For all these reasons, our present crisis is not just a financial meltdown crying out for a cash injection. We are in much deeper trouble. In fact, we as a country have become General Motors — as a result of our national drift. Look in the mirror: G.M. is us.

That’s why we don’t just need a bailout. We need a reboot. We need a build out. We need a buildup. We need a national makeover. That is why the next few months are among the most important in U.S. history. Because of the financial crisis, Barack Obama has the bipartisan support to spend $1 trillion in stimulus. But we must make certain that every bailout dollar, which we’re borrowing from our kids’ future, is spent wisely.

It has to go into training teachers, educating scientists and engineers, paying for research and building the most productivity-enhancing infrastructure — without building white elephants. Generally, I’d like to see fewer government dollars shoveled out and more creative tax incentives to stimulate the private sector to catalyze new industries and new markets. If we allow this money to be spent on pork, it will be the end of us.

America still has the right stuff to thrive. We still have the most creative, diverse, innovative culture and open society — in a world where the ability to imagine and generate new ideas with speed and to implement them through global collaboration is the most important competitive advantage. China may have great airports, but last week it went back to censoring The New York Times and other Western news sites. Censorship restricts your people’s imaginations. That’s really, really dumb. And that’s why for all our missteps, the 21st century is still up for grabs.

John Kennedy led us on a journey to discover the moon. Obama needs to lead us on a journey to rediscover, rebuild and reinvent our own backyard.

Merry Christmas!

New York Times Original Article

SimpleSam06

martin1016 wrote: »

Landing at Kennedy Airport from Hong Kong was, as I’ve argued before, like going from the Jetsons to the Flintstones.

He should have tried going into the Chinese interior, it would have been like going from the Flintstones to the primordial soup.

OfflerCrocGod

SimpleSam06 wrote: »

He should have tried going into the Chinese interior, it would have been like going from the Flintstones to the primordial soup.

Yes but the Chinese are busy working on that too.

cavedave

America still has the right stuff to thrive. We still have the most creative, diverse, innovative culture and open society — in a world where the ability to imagine and generate new ideas with speed and to implement them through global collaboration is the most important competitive advantage. China may have great airports, but last week it went back to censoring The New York Times and other Western news sites. Censorship restricts your people’s imaginations. That’s really, really dumb. And that’s why for all our missteps, the 21st century is still up for grabs.

More politics then economics but this paragraph points out a great advantage of western culture. One that is generally ignored.

The article also points out that general distaste for intellectualism and creativity are to the detriment of a society.

martin1016

cavedave wrote: »

More politics then economics but this paragraph points out a great advantage of western culture. One that is generally ignored.

The article also points out that general distaste for intellectualism and creativity are to the detriment of a society.

Agreed - engineering, science, medical etc seem to be cast aside. Uptake in colleges is poor and these intellectual careers are shunned when they should be focussed upon. Western countries need to get back to creating and producing.

I also believe the west can be competitive for many products, particularly higher value, lower volume where quality is a factor am especially in innovation and product development. Here I wonder how much of the transfer of production to the east could have been resisted if share holders etc had actually been willing to settle for lower margins and lower returns rather than getting caught up in the demands of the financial markets.

China is feeling the pain, I travel out there a few times a year and job losses are significant in the electronics industry (my industry so its all I can speak of). Foxconn are laying off 100,000, many smaller facilities are closing, people are cannot get jobs and new graduates are really struggling with positions (Article 1, Article 2, Article 3) although as it is CHina its is impossible to know what to believe.

So to get back on track, how do we innovate? Look at the Kennedy Space Programme, consider the amount of people it employed directly and indirectly but more importantly consider the off shoots in terms of products and technologies that have become part of everyday life and the opportuinities that it created. Now look at the bail out plan for the car industry or the banking industry, what if 10 or 20% of those numbers had been diverted towards innovative start ups?

Apply the same logic here, 17 bn for banking sector, what would 10% of that do? Would it create an Irish MIT? Ignore this R&D sound bite, someone that has lost their job needs to earn money, they are not going into R&D, they need to pay the bills, if they are willing to work, have a good idea and meet specific criteria what would 100k do for them in terms of getting off the ground and developing a product and getting it to market?

1.7 bn could help start up 17,000 companies (100k each), if only 1 in 3 survived to employ 10 people it's still 50k jobs. We might even get a few gems out of it, develop some real Irish owned IP and actually become this knowledge based ecconomy that is continuously tossed out there by the politician to the media.

So where do you think we should invest and how should it be done? Cos lets face it the Government haven't a clue.

SimpleSam06

martin1016 wrote: »

Western countries need to get back to creating and producing.

Its worth noting that seven of the ten worlds largest exporters are Western countries, excluding the EU. The largest, Germany, is also western.

Your points are excellently made however, and I would be in strong agreement with many of them. I do think we need a massive infrastructure buildout first, to facilitate industry, and several major educational / r&d facilities to provide the educated workforce required to grow those industries.

Its amazing when you put it like that how many better places the money could go to. I would say though that 100k isn't much to start a business - it won't even employ three people for a year on average industrial wage, to say nothing of facilites, stock, plant, marketing (a huge expense), levies and so on. Still, even quadrupling the amount puts 4000 new businesses on the books.

OfflerCrocGod

Surely 1 in 3 is optimistic as most of the people who would be given this seed money might not be that driven to actually succeed. I'm not convinced everyone is capable of setting up a successful business and the people who try are more likely to be those who can succeed.