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On an email list for a specific event which I'll not name here (not CascadiaCon), a new person has apparently been trying to ask how to go about setting up a science-fiction convention in his hometown. (This is not on topic for the list, and he'd have been presented with the topic when joining.) His writing is random enough that it took a few tries to figure out what he was actually asking - most people thought it was some new bizarre form of spam - and his use of punctuation is peculiar and random, and not in that l33t way.
Anyway, someone finally commented on his incoherence, to which he replied with unusual clarity:
And I know that grammar flames are so very very old-school, but honestly, I had to reply:
* It has to do with Japanese automakers skipping the USA when building new plants and going to higher-labour-cost Canada instead, because the workers aren't illiterate and the training problems in America were too expensive to overcome.
* It has to do with the US's increasingly anti-science stance, stoked on by the fundamentalist movement, who want "bible-based science" like Creationism and worse. It's bad enough that Bill Frist brought it up in an interview last week. Bill. Frist.
* It has to do with the US starting to lose its edge in attracting the brightest foreign students to earn PhDs at our universities - compounded by increasing difficulties in students being allowed to come at all.
* It has to do with the US's flagging interest in research fields, and it has to do with how other countries with dramatically larger populations don't have to gain all that much in terms of percentage of research-capable population to surpass the US in absolute numbers, by a lot.
The US is going through another one of its anti-science, pro-fundamentalism surges. It does this every so often, so this isn't anything new; with its agricultural and religious-colony influences, it can't really surprise anyone that we have to struggle through this on a recurring basis. However, this one is particularly poorly timed, as it's coming during a time that we can least get away with it. Worse, thanks to the timing, it's also simultaneously closing its borders to smart people who want to come here, in an inappropriately nativist reaction to the threat of terrorism.
And unlike some of the other problems the country is facing, I have very little idea of what to do about it on a national scale. The fundamentalist movement has done a fairly decent job of discrediting public schools, in no small part because the public school system has done a fairly good job of discrediting itself by not responding adequately to the changing needs of the national economy. It was built to process most people into reasonably-acceptable moderately-skilled workers, with a significant cadre of unskilled workers being a completely acceptable by-product. It was also built to collect a smallish minourity into collegiate preparedness, and send them on to higher degrees1, something it is managing less and less well as the percentage going on to college climbs.
However, that's not really what the country needs anymore. Having a sizable percentage of the population being subliterate unskilled workers can't fly when you're competing against countries who can have thirty or so times your population in that category working for 70c/hour. Sure, there're always going to be places for unskilled and semi-skilled labour, but they aren't going to be a lot of them in manufacturing any longer - not in this country, not for some time.
So the US can't compete in that area. But that's not the new part; everybody knows semi-skilled and unskilled labour is in trouble, and has been for a years and years. Nobody's been willing to address the issue adequately, but that's a different story. What's new (semi-new, anyway) is that it's moving up the educational scale, with wage disparities that are less dramatic, but still very, very significant. Accounting and record-keeping, in no small part, is moving overseas. Software development and IT are moving overseas. Legal services are moving overseas, with Indian and Chinese students earning degrees in American law so they can do work that can be offshored from the US. The list goes on.
As with the energy situation, I suspect that a lot of the lack of strong reaction on the part of Americans so far has to do with a failure to understand the scale of China and India. The US has around 300 million people. India and China have over two billion between them. When you're dealing with number disparities that large, the multipliers in the larger countries do not have to be very large to create major ripple effects in the smaller country. That's why the newfound Chinese appetite for automobiles matters, for example; it may be only a small percentage of their country, but it would be a much larger percentage in ours, and similarly, have a much larger impact on gasoline demand, and, accordingly, the price of oil.
Now, here's the trick: none of this is inherently bad, overall. It's good that hundreds of millions of Chinese people aren't starving anymore, and hope to improve their lot in life. I'm for it. And, as I'll discuss in a minute, China in particular is keeping our economy afloat. But there's a tradeoff, in that the further down the combined educational ladder most Americans fall, the worse off they're individually going to be economically - as individuals in the short term, and as a country in the long.
This is a serious problem, and one that so far remains mostly unsolved. Eventually, it will spawn a reactionary protectionism to choke off this "unfair competition." The beginnings of this have already appeared, quietly. Indeed, I think that aforementioned lack of comprehension of scale is probably what's saving us from some very, very bad political decisions, like another Smoot-Hartley tariff wall.
But why is protectionism bad, really? In some cases, it doesn't have to be. Despite being a free-trader, I acknowledge the usefulness of phased tariff systems to ease domestic uncertainty when significantly-disparate economies begin to mesh. Such judicious use of tariff buffers is rare under the best of circumstances, but it exists.
The more significant problem with it in this particular moment comes from our position of international2 and domestic debtor, most significantly, in energy. Put bluntly: if other countries, particularly China, were not subsidising our debts and product/production costs, the United States would be entering a significant economic upheaval right now, prompted by spiraling energy costs and inflationary debt. As oil goes up, production costs go up; but if that's buffered by lower prices created by cheap imports, the total price shift will be much smaller. (And of course, China is affected as well - but with dramatically lower production costs from other factors, there's a lot more profit buffer to be used competitively before prices are forced up.) That's why we haven't had inflation go through the roof yet.
China, of course, doesn't want this crisis to happen to the US. They export to us, after all. Aside from that, they have a lot of dollars, which they are now starting to spend. They want those to hold some value. There may come a point when they need cheaper (for them) oil than they need to hold value of dollar capital, and at that point, they'll really let the yuan rise - and that's when their subsidy of our interesting financial practices will slow, and slow substantially.
I don't know when that point will arrive, but we need to be ready for it, because if we're not, it would prompt a significant inflationary period in the United States. Imported Chinese goods would become significantly more expensive. The falling dollar would make oil even more expensive for domestic buyers. "Stagflation" is nobody's friend, but would be everybody's neighbour.
The hope would be that by the time this happens, the economy will have grown enough overall that it can be absorbed at reasonable cost, and production efficiencies would also eat into (and against) the price climb. It's a kind of financing of inflation, really; putting the inflation cost of debt off until later, until hopefully you're making enough money not to care about the bill. This theory works, on some scales; c.f. Japan and South Korea, even if they're still net creditors. It's a Keyesnian approach to inflation. But I would have more confidence in this theory if I didn't think we were also at the end of cheap oil, and if the potential scaling issues weren't so dramatically different.
Regardless of how it plays out in the end, though, we can't - to use the Israeli terminology - disengage from China and India. The cost would be economic chaos, and almost certain military instability. We have to compete, both as individuals and a country. But what can we do to improve the situation?
Individually, I think the answer is to get smart. Assume you'll need to keep up studies through most of your life. Assume that you'll go back to school, probably while working, and prepare accordingly. Assume you will change careers at least once in your life, maybe two or three times; arguably, we're all professional students now.
However, for the country as a whole - I don't know. The fundamentalist movement does not care about science, and actively opposes anything that contradicts their particular fundamentalist vision of the world. Hopefully we're at the end of this current upswing - there are indications that we might be - but at the same time, they're preparing to go multigenerational on some of these fronts, like anti-gay philosophy and creationism. How successful that will be I can't predict - I hope they won't be, and economics will likely force the truly dedicated off to the sidelines over time. But in this period, here and now, they're in a strong political position and are using their clout in ways that are going to harm the country's ability to compete internationally in the ways that are going to be most important3.
That's what the whole stem-cell debate and creationism fight are really about, in my mind; whether we're going to make the same mistake the Arabic world did in the 14th century in the face of challenges from Europe. If we turn to fundamentalism over the observable world, if we look back to eden and the faux-perfection of instinct instead of forward to whatever it might be we can create, we will be left behind, and we will relegated to Lenin's ashbin of history. That's all there is to it.
My hope is that economics will win out, because if there's anything Americans like, it's making money. Given that, I think that people will, if pushed to it, buckle down and do what they need to. Americans really are pretty good at that; we're lazy, and I include myself in that, but not terminally so. If it becomes obvious enough early enough - and the business community seems to think it may need to become a part of making it obvious, c.f. Fortune's column on the need for more PhDs in America, in their recent series on competing with China - then people will do the necessary things.
But on the other hand, if they decide to chase their tails around endlessly in a cascading series of pyramid-scheme-like non-constructive bubble economies, such as the real-estate boom and deep-indebtedness games4... then, well, we're in trouble. And the failure of the educational system has made these kinds of games more likely, not less. But let's hope for the best, shall we? People learn, eventually, and the economy is a strict teacher.
And now, today's flower picture:
Shyness
1: As of the last couple of decades, the collegiate system has, to a sizable degree, mutated into a completion of that old high-school process, molding most of its membership into moderately-skilled professionals, and preparing a smallish percentage to post-graduate study. One can argue, in fact, that if you aren't getting some sort of post-graduate degree, you probably aren't going to be prepared for the higher-end workforce in another ten to fifteen years. To my mind, it is important to re-value the high school diploma by making it universally credible again, as it is in many Western countries, and in Japan. While I do not advocate cram school systems, I do support full-year schools as a step towards this goal. I also support multistreaming, which requires a much larger teacher pool. Since these cost money, I doubt we'll see them soon.
2: It has been argued that what the American government and economy actually export is not dollars, but is instead security. I find this theory interesting and think it may be valid. I also note that as of a few years ago, it seems reasonable to argue that the American government stopped exporting security, or at least reduced its output. If this theory is true, it would be reasonable to predict that at that point, the value of the dollar would fall. And it did, significantly. Possible ramifications are obvious.
3: It's genuinely not fair to put all the blame on the fundamentalist movement, as tempting as it may be, because they don't own this problem themselves. They're simply one expression of it. They are the group with the most clout right now, which is why I single them out, but it's not just them. Many groups of Americans are not particularly pro-education, and many subcultures are actively disapproving. I'm not the first to notice this, and many people have tried to solve the problem. I have no better a sense of how to do it than anyone else.
4: US savings rate in June: 0%. US savings rate in July (estimate): -0.6%. A subject worthy of its own rant entirely!
Wednesday's miles: 2.2
Miles out of Hobbiton: 376.7
Miles to Rivendell: 181.6
( A second flower picture - warning, it has a spider in the frame )
Anyway, someone finally commented on his incoherence, to which he replied with unusual clarity:
If I wanted an english teacher..i'd hire one........HAS EVERYONE GONE COMPLETELY INSANE?!
And I know that grammar flames are so very very old-school, but honestly, I had to reply:
I got a similar reaction from a student I was TAing in grad school, when I was begging him go to the remedial writing help centre on campus. He failed my course and ended up out of college very shortly thereafter, because nobody could understand what the hell he was trying to say when writing.Now, what does all of this have to do with anything?
And that's the thing; by punctuating randomly and adding a lot of visual noise, you are making it actively more difficult and time-consuming for the people you hope will read your messages to actually do so. You may even be preventing them from understanding it at all, by introducing ambiguities you may not even be aware are there.
At best, you're asking us to do extra work to make up for your unwillingness to communicate in standard written English. You're demanding special attention and effort to no apparent benefit for anyone.
And unless she's got a very good reason, well... homey don't play that.
So if you don't mind your "content" being dismissed out of hand, by all means, continue to scribble semi-coherently onto the page. But I assure you that I, and probably many others, won't waste our time trying to decode the dribbles and scrawls you might choose to scratch out.
* It has to do with Japanese automakers skipping the USA when building new plants and going to higher-labour-cost Canada instead, because the workers aren't illiterate and the training problems in America were too expensive to overcome.
* It has to do with the US's increasingly anti-science stance, stoked on by the fundamentalist movement, who want "bible-based science" like Creationism and worse. It's bad enough that Bill Frist brought it up in an interview last week. Bill. Frist.
* It has to do with the US starting to lose its edge in attracting the brightest foreign students to earn PhDs at our universities - compounded by increasing difficulties in students being allowed to come at all.
* It has to do with the US's flagging interest in research fields, and it has to do with how other countries with dramatically larger populations don't have to gain all that much in terms of percentage of research-capable population to surpass the US in absolute numbers, by a lot.
The US is going through another one of its anti-science, pro-fundamentalism surges. It does this every so often, so this isn't anything new; with its agricultural and religious-colony influences, it can't really surprise anyone that we have to struggle through this on a recurring basis. However, this one is particularly poorly timed, as it's coming during a time that we can least get away with it. Worse, thanks to the timing, it's also simultaneously closing its borders to smart people who want to come here, in an inappropriately nativist reaction to the threat of terrorism.
And unlike some of the other problems the country is facing, I have very little idea of what to do about it on a national scale. The fundamentalist movement has done a fairly decent job of discrediting public schools, in no small part because the public school system has done a fairly good job of discrediting itself by not responding adequately to the changing needs of the national economy. It was built to process most people into reasonably-acceptable moderately-skilled workers, with a significant cadre of unskilled workers being a completely acceptable by-product. It was also built to collect a smallish minourity into collegiate preparedness, and send them on to higher degrees1, something it is managing less and less well as the percentage going on to college climbs.
However, that's not really what the country needs anymore. Having a sizable percentage of the population being subliterate unskilled workers can't fly when you're competing against countries who can have thirty or so times your population in that category working for 70c/hour. Sure, there're always going to be places for unskilled and semi-skilled labour, but they aren't going to be a lot of them in manufacturing any longer - not in this country, not for some time.
So the US can't compete in that area. But that's not the new part; everybody knows semi-skilled and unskilled labour is in trouble, and has been for a years and years. Nobody's been willing to address the issue adequately, but that's a different story. What's new (semi-new, anyway) is that it's moving up the educational scale, with wage disparities that are less dramatic, but still very, very significant. Accounting and record-keeping, in no small part, is moving overseas. Software development and IT are moving overseas. Legal services are moving overseas, with Indian and Chinese students earning degrees in American law so they can do work that can be offshored from the US. The list goes on.
As with the energy situation, I suspect that a lot of the lack of strong reaction on the part of Americans so far has to do with a failure to understand the scale of China and India. The US has around 300 million people. India and China have over two billion between them. When you're dealing with number disparities that large, the multipliers in the larger countries do not have to be very large to create major ripple effects in the smaller country. That's why the newfound Chinese appetite for automobiles matters, for example; it may be only a small percentage of their country, but it would be a much larger percentage in ours, and similarly, have a much larger impact on gasoline demand, and, accordingly, the price of oil.
Now, here's the trick: none of this is inherently bad, overall. It's good that hundreds of millions of Chinese people aren't starving anymore, and hope to improve their lot in life. I'm for it. And, as I'll discuss in a minute, China in particular is keeping our economy afloat. But there's a tradeoff, in that the further down the combined educational ladder most Americans fall, the worse off they're individually going to be economically - as individuals in the short term, and as a country in the long.
This is a serious problem, and one that so far remains mostly unsolved. Eventually, it will spawn a reactionary protectionism to choke off this "unfair competition." The beginnings of this have already appeared, quietly. Indeed, I think that aforementioned lack of comprehension of scale is probably what's saving us from some very, very bad political decisions, like another Smoot-Hartley tariff wall.
But why is protectionism bad, really? In some cases, it doesn't have to be. Despite being a free-trader, I acknowledge the usefulness of phased tariff systems to ease domestic uncertainty when significantly-disparate economies begin to mesh. Such judicious use of tariff buffers is rare under the best of circumstances, but it exists.
The more significant problem with it in this particular moment comes from our position of international2 and domestic debtor, most significantly, in energy. Put bluntly: if other countries, particularly China, were not subsidising our debts and product/production costs, the United States would be entering a significant economic upheaval right now, prompted by spiraling energy costs and inflationary debt. As oil goes up, production costs go up; but if that's buffered by lower prices created by cheap imports, the total price shift will be much smaller. (And of course, China is affected as well - but with dramatically lower production costs from other factors, there's a lot more profit buffer to be used competitively before prices are forced up.) That's why we haven't had inflation go through the roof yet.
China, of course, doesn't want this crisis to happen to the US. They export to us, after all. Aside from that, they have a lot of dollars, which they are now starting to spend. They want those to hold some value. There may come a point when they need cheaper (for them) oil than they need to hold value of dollar capital, and at that point, they'll really let the yuan rise - and that's when their subsidy of our interesting financial practices will slow, and slow substantially.
I don't know when that point will arrive, but we need to be ready for it, because if we're not, it would prompt a significant inflationary period in the United States. Imported Chinese goods would become significantly more expensive. The falling dollar would make oil even more expensive for domestic buyers. "Stagflation" is nobody's friend, but would be everybody's neighbour.
The hope would be that by the time this happens, the economy will have grown enough overall that it can be absorbed at reasonable cost, and production efficiencies would also eat into (and against) the price climb. It's a kind of financing of inflation, really; putting the inflation cost of debt off until later, until hopefully you're making enough money not to care about the bill. This theory works, on some scales; c.f. Japan and South Korea, even if they're still net creditors. It's a Keyesnian approach to inflation. But I would have more confidence in this theory if I didn't think we were also at the end of cheap oil, and if the potential scaling issues weren't so dramatically different.
Regardless of how it plays out in the end, though, we can't - to use the Israeli terminology - disengage from China and India. The cost would be economic chaos, and almost certain military instability. We have to compete, both as individuals and a country. But what can we do to improve the situation?
Individually, I think the answer is to get smart. Assume you'll need to keep up studies through most of your life. Assume that you'll go back to school, probably while working, and prepare accordingly. Assume you will change careers at least once in your life, maybe two or three times; arguably, we're all professional students now.
However, for the country as a whole - I don't know. The fundamentalist movement does not care about science, and actively opposes anything that contradicts their particular fundamentalist vision of the world. Hopefully we're at the end of this current upswing - there are indications that we might be - but at the same time, they're preparing to go multigenerational on some of these fronts, like anti-gay philosophy and creationism. How successful that will be I can't predict - I hope they won't be, and economics will likely force the truly dedicated off to the sidelines over time. But in this period, here and now, they're in a strong political position and are using their clout in ways that are going to harm the country's ability to compete internationally in the ways that are going to be most important3.
That's what the whole stem-cell debate and creationism fight are really about, in my mind; whether we're going to make the same mistake the Arabic world did in the 14th century in the face of challenges from Europe. If we turn to fundamentalism over the observable world, if we look back to eden and the faux-perfection of instinct instead of forward to whatever it might be we can create, we will be left behind, and we will relegated to Lenin's ashbin of history. That's all there is to it.
My hope is that economics will win out, because if there's anything Americans like, it's making money. Given that, I think that people will, if pushed to it, buckle down and do what they need to. Americans really are pretty good at that; we're lazy, and I include myself in that, but not terminally so. If it becomes obvious enough early enough - and the business community seems to think it may need to become a part of making it obvious, c.f. Fortune's column on the need for more PhDs in America, in their recent series on competing with China - then people will do the necessary things.
But on the other hand, if they decide to chase their tails around endlessly in a cascading series of pyramid-scheme-like non-constructive bubble economies, such as the real-estate boom and deep-indebtedness games4... then, well, we're in trouble. And the failure of the educational system has made these kinds of games more likely, not less. But let's hope for the best, shall we? People learn, eventually, and the economy is a strict teacher.
And now, today's flower picture:
Shyness
1: As of the last couple of decades, the collegiate system has, to a sizable degree, mutated into a completion of that old high-school process, molding most of its membership into moderately-skilled professionals, and preparing a smallish percentage to post-graduate study. One can argue, in fact, that if you aren't getting some sort of post-graduate degree, you probably aren't going to be prepared for the higher-end workforce in another ten to fifteen years. To my mind, it is important to re-value the high school diploma by making it universally credible again, as it is in many Western countries, and in Japan. While I do not advocate cram school systems, I do support full-year schools as a step towards this goal. I also support multistreaming, which requires a much larger teacher pool. Since these cost money, I doubt we'll see them soon.
2: It has been argued that what the American government and economy actually export is not dollars, but is instead security. I find this theory interesting and think it may be valid. I also note that as of a few years ago, it seems reasonable to argue that the American government stopped exporting security, or at least reduced its output. If this theory is true, it would be reasonable to predict that at that point, the value of the dollar would fall. And it did, significantly. Possible ramifications are obvious.
3: It's genuinely not fair to put all the blame on the fundamentalist movement, as tempting as it may be, because they don't own this problem themselves. They're simply one expression of it. They are the group with the most clout right now, which is why I single them out, but it's not just them. Many groups of Americans are not particularly pro-education, and many subcultures are actively disapproving. I'm not the first to notice this, and many people have tried to solve the problem. I have no better a sense of how to do it than anyone else.
4: US savings rate in June: 0%. US savings rate in July (estimate): -0.6%. A subject worthy of its own rant entirely!
Wednesday's miles: 2.2
Miles out of Hobbiton: 376.7
Miles to Rivendell: 181.6
( A second flower picture - warning, it has a spider in the frame )
