Economic Shift Happens

The shift is happening! Economy, technology, information - you name it is happening at a much faster pace than anyone expected. And it is accelerating! Can American culture keep up? See the article below to find America’s secret weapon.

Robert E. Freer, Jr., The Free Enterprise Foundation

I expect most of you suffer the same malady that I do: chronic junk mail “itis”. It is part of the cost of our modern society. Every day, my computer in-box is jammed with almost three hundred unwanted emails that get shunted to my “junk mail box” so that I can approximate some semblance of efficient review and handling of the rest. Every day I delete. Every day it is filled. It has become a ritual. Someone mails it thinking I will read it. I pretend to at least review them, but in fact summarily dump virtually all into oblivion.

In the brief time available to review this unwanted mail, an occasional gem will catch my eye. “Shift Happens” is just such an item. A DVD Created by Karl Fish and modified by Scott McLeod, it takes, in about six minutes, a sobering view of the situation faced by our children and theirs in competition with the newly emerging centers of technology on the other side of the globe.

Mr. Fisch reminds us in the presentation of an array of statistical material of the pre-eminence of Great Britain at the beginning of the 20th Century and the expectation that it was an unassailable pinnacle. Having gotten our attention, he proceeds, backed by some eerie highland violins, to shock us into awareness of our plight:

For every one in a million student in China, there are 1300 just like him. In India there are 1100. The 25% brightest students in China exceed the total population of North America. (That’s 28% for India.) They have more honors students than we have students. China is about to pass the United States as the country with the largest population of English speakers. If we exported all our jobs to China, they could fill all of them and still have a surplus population. In the time it took the DVD to run, 60 babies will be born in the U.S., 244 in China and 351 in India.

The Department of Labor tells us that one out of four of us have been employed by our present employer less than a year, and one out of two has been with their employer less than five years. They cite former governor Riley for the fact that the top ten jobs in 2010 have not been invented yet. In fact an individual starting their technical education today will have the information taught in the first year become obsolete before the end of year three. “We are educating kids for jobs that haven’t been invented yet with information that is outdated to answer questions we don’t even know we have.”

Google processes 2.7 billion queries monthly. The pace of creation of technical information is doubling every two years. To handle the processing of this information, we shipped 47 million computers last year and are fast nearing the ability to ship to the third world fifty to one hundred million $100 computers. By 2013 we should have a computer that will exceed the computational ability of the human mind and by 2023 that computer will cost around $1,000. By 2049 we expect to have a similar cost computer that will exceed the computational ability of the human race.

We send more text messages every day than there are people on earth, and if “My Space” were a country, (106 million users) it would be the 11th largest in the world. The velocity of change is so great that a week’s worth of the New York Times has more new information than an average 18th century Englishman would encounter in a lifetime. We are now close to installation of third generation fiber optic cable that can handle 150,000,000 simultaneous phone calls per second or 1900 CDs. That capacity is estimated to double every 6 months for the next twenty years. By 2010 the amount of new technical information is expected to double every 72 hours.

The challenge is stark. The challenge is immediate, and our survival depends on how well we embrace the challenge. The authors note that the government is not even spending half of the 140 million a year on educational innovation that Nintendo spends on research and development. What I get out of that is that it is, never-the-less, being spent. R & D spending by Nintendo and many others is propelling a huge innovation employment market.

One thing is certain; this market will be filled by our children or those who can do the job. Government’s failure to properly fund public education is significant in the risk it poses to our society of social stratification and its accompanying stresses. Our free society is up to solving both the educational and social problems that confront us, but time is passing and our failures to protect our basic values are compounding our challenge. Porous borders, distain for individual responsibility and self absorption are all sapping the national will.

In a recent report to CEO’s by a prominent former senior intelligence official, there is, in our transformation, a ray of hope. They were advised that the restructuring of American business harkens the end of the age of employer and employee. Employment cannot be guaranteed nor the shape of the business itself even a year into the future. We must think like independent contractors. Husbands and wives are economic units making tradeoffs to balance their needs both emotional and financial.

This requires a huge shift in the American economy. The good news is that we are doing it and inventing the only truly 21st century model economy in the process. The bad news is that we are doing it, and it is socially disruptive, painful and is happening at warp speed to compound our social dislocation.

The official makes it clear that our competitors are not supermen by noting the severe unpublicized problems in the transformation of Far Eastern societies and praises our new economy as “fast, flexible, highly productive and unstable in that it is always fracturing and re-fracturing. “It will,”… increase the gap between the U.S. and everybody else, especially Europe and Japan.”

He concludes and I do as well:

“At the same time, the military gap is increasing. Other than China, we are the only country that is continuing to put money into their military. Plus, we are the only military getting on-the-ground military experience through our war in Iraq. We know which high-tech weapons are working and which ones aren't. There is almost no one who can take us on economically or militarily.

“There has never been a superpower in this position before. On the one hand, this makes the U.S. a magnet for bright and ambitious people. It also makes us a target. We are becoming one of the last holdouts of the traditional Judeo-Christian culture. There is no better place in the world to be in business and raise children. The U. S. is by far the best place to have an idea, form a business and put it into the marketplace. We take it for granted, but it isn't as available in other countries of the world.

“Ultimately, it's an issue of culture. The only people who can hurt us are ourselves, by losing our culture. If we give up our Judeo-Christian culture, we become just like the Europeans. The culture war is the whole ballgame. If we lose it, there isn't another America to pull us out.”

Copyright © 2007 by Robert E. Freer, Jr. All rights reserved

About the author: Robert E. Freer, Jr. is President of The Free Enterprise Foundation. He is a Visiting Professor, at The Citadel and elected in 2005 to be their first John S. Grinalds Leader in Residence. A regular contributor to the Mercury, He can be reached by E-mail at The Citadel . Copies of his earlier columns can be found The Free Enterprise Foundation.

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