How to Restore the American Dream

[The Enchanted One]

The American dream for me, growing up in India in the 1970s, looked something like the opening credits of Dallas. The blockbuster TV series began with a kaleidoscope of big, brassy, sexy images — tracts of open land, shiny skyscrapers, fancy cars, cowboy businessmen and the very dreamy Victoria Principal. We watched bootlegged copies of the show, passed around on old Betamax cassettes. America (certainly the CBS soap-opera version of America) seemed dazzling and larger than life, especially set against the stagnant backdrop of India in the 1970s. Everyone I knew was fascinated by the U.S., whether they admitted it or not. Politicians who denounced the country by day would go home in the evenings and plot to send their kids to college in "the States."

Of course, the 1970s were actually tough times in America — stagflation, malaise, the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate — but they were brutal in the rest of the world. Hyperinflation racked most third-world countries; coups and martial law were familiar occurrences, even affecting staunchly democratic India, where emergency rule was enforced from 1975 to 1977. Set against this atmosphere of despair, the U.S. looked like a shining city on a hill.

http://www.time.com/time/nation/arti...026776,00.html



It's Fareed Zakaria but he has some points....

[beNder]

Some good points and pretty good read.

"Technology has changed the game in jobs," he said. "We had technology bumping around for years in the '80s and '90s, and [we were] trying to make it work. And now it's working ... You couple the habits [of efficiency] from a deep recession [with] an exponential increase in technology, and you're not going to see jobs for a long, long time." Welch gave as an example a company owned by the private-equity firm with which he is affiliated. In 2007 the business had 26,000 employees and generated $12 billion in revenue. It will return to those revenue numbers by 2013 but with only 14,000 employees. "Companies have learned to do more with less," Welch said.

Says a lot about the job prospects in the coming years.

[Mackie]

He missed one point. What's the daily headline in US business newspapers? X sues Y, F sues H, ...........

[stexbliss]

I think Zakaria is misguided as his usual. IMO the main toxic undercurrent in the American economy is the distortion in trade flows that China's mercantilist policies have created in the last 2 decades. For the last 20 or so years the US has exported millions of jobs to China, driven in large part chinese growth through its internal consumption, exported countless technologies and got literally shafted for it. In a situation of undistorted trade, China's rising wealth would generate demand for American products but that is not the case (1) because of an undervalued currency and (2) because of barriers to market entry. Another aggravation is that the US cannot sell to the chinese its currency-insensitive products (largely military related).

Successive administrations made a geopolitical calculation to try to integrate China into the world economy and this is the result. The accession of China to the WTO must the joke of the century.

[HK in AK]

If you do not have good technology skills for the future, you will be severly limited. I cringe about co-workers and subordinates that lack good computer skills, and will send them to remedial classes in the use of MS Office. I am strongly considering going back to school and getting another degree in software development, since I like it so much.

[Scriptable]

If you do not have good technology skills for the future, you will be severly limited. I cringe about co-workers and subordinates that lack good computer skills, and will send them to remedial classes in the use of MS Office. I am strongly considering going back to school and getting another degree in software development, since I like it so much.

Software development is awesome, but in terms of job prospects many entry-level positions have disappeared due to so many jobs being off-shored. There are good-paying jobs for people with extensive experience, but far fewer for people just starting out unfortunately.

[C.Puffs]

Software development is awesome, but in terms of job prospects many entry-level positions have disappeared due to so many jobs being off-shored. There are good-paying jobs for people with extensive experience, but far fewer for people just starting out unfortunately.

x2. In content creation it's particularly bad.