My two recommended readings for this New Year are both stunning, not necessarily in the sense of beauty, but pointing in directions that, like a video game, I hope there is an exit not yet visible from this point in the game, but hopefully there if We can just garner some super powers....the hope is for the generations coming on some of us are close enough to the finish line we can fall or stagger across, but these two pieces encapsulate a game that feels more like musical chairs rather than the video game with progressively less possible winners as the chairs are removed
....I remember a profesor at ND discussing this with me 50+ years ago, the industrial age per se being over, and the new worlds of work being service industries. That proposition held up fairly well for the last five decades, but the going for everyone but the 1 % (probably more like15%) seems to be getting rougher..Now the question is not how we get there so much as who is left by the side of the road.
The piece about the Iphone points out the magnitude of the manufacturing forces available, basically at a days notice, to do something like reengineer and produce the IPhone in a fraction of a year......Adam Davidson in the Planet money piece describes the bottom endge workers, and their tenuous hold (if they are lucky enough to have a hold at all) on a laborers job, and the contrast across town (as opposed to the Detroit vs Silicon valley juxtaposition) in greenville where a group of super high tech workers, few and highly skilled, crank out autoparts....he pointss out that US and China produce about the same amount of manufactured goods, but that despite growth in US, number of jobs in manufacturing has govne from 18 mil to 12 mil in a decade or so.....
If you get a chance listen and read, and especially those with experience in the world of econ/busines, tell me that it will all work out!
....I remember a profesor at ND discussing this with me 50+ years ago, the industrial age per se being over, and the new worlds of work being service industries. That proposition held up fairly well for the last five decades, but the going for everyone but the 1 % (probably more like15%) seems to be getting rougher..Now the question is not how we get there so much as who is left by the side of the road.
The piece about the Iphone points out the magnitude of the manufacturing forces available, basically at a days notice, to do something like reengineer and produce the IPhone in a fraction of a year......Adam Davidson in the Planet money piece describes the bottom endge workers, and their tenuous hold (if they are lucky enough to have a hold at all) on a laborers job, and the contrast across town (as opposed to the Detroit vs Silicon valley juxtaposition) in greenville where a group of super high tech workers, few and highly skilled, crank out autoparts....he pointss out that US and China produce about the same amount of manufactured goods, but that despite growth in US, number of jobs in manufacturing has govne from 18 mil to 12 mil in a decade or so.....
If you get a chance listen and read, and especially those with experience in the world of econ/busines, tell me that it will all work out!
The first reading is the article in the NYTimes, Sunday last, about IPhones.....and Steven Jobs and jobs and the scale necessary to achieve it and the reality that at present only China....the second was a broadcast, 15 minutes, on Planet Money, which is an NPR Podcast on the Industrial Revolution as mirrored in Greenville NC, epicenter of the Textile industry, now dead, and New manufacturing....and who is left standing.
