Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Little Bobby Reich is the measure of the pwagmatic pwog elite's good intentions. In a multi-part post at his blog site recently, he recapped America's job mission as he sees it. Interestingly enough it starts with abject surrender:

"First and most broadly, it doesn't make sense for America to try to maintain or enlarge manufacturing as a portion of the economy.... Even if the U.S. were to seal its borders and bar any manufactured goods from coming in from abroad ... we'd still be losing manufacturing jobs. That's mainly because of technology."

What a colossal fallacy. Yes, jobs are evaporating inside modern plants, but that hardly means modern plants ought not be built here.

"A century ago, almost 30% of adult Americans worked on a farm. Nowadays, fewer than 5% do."

No. Here's the real gimmick, embedded in mush:

"Stop blaming poor nations whose workers get very low wages. Of course their wages are low; these nations are poor. They can become more prosperous only by exporting to rich nations."

As Church Lady used to say, "how conveeeeenient."

But let us continue following the bouncing dwarf:

"When the U.S. economy gets back on track, many routine jobs won't be returning -- but new jobs will take their place. [They] are easy to overlook -- much of the new value added is invisible."

Invisible value-added? Yes here it comes, Father, as you knew it would -- the IP express:

"A growing percent of every consumer dollar goes to people who analyze, manipulate, innovate and create.

These people are responsible for research and development, design and engineering. Or for high-level sales, marketing and advertising. They're composers, writers and producers. They're lawyers, journalists, doctors and management consultants. I call this "symbolic analytic" work because most of it has to do with analyzing, manipulating and communicating through numbers, shapes, words, ideas."

"Symbolic-analytic work can't be directly touched or held in your hands, as goods that come out of factories can be...."

"Whatever consumers buy these days, they're paying more for these sorts of tasks than for the physical material or its assemblage. On the back of every iPod is the notice "Designed by Apple in California, Assembled in China...."

"You can bet iPod's design garners a bigger share of the iPod's purchase price than its assembly...."

"America’s biggest challenge is to educate more of our people sufficiently to excel at such tasks.... In decades to come, nations with the highest percentages of their working populations able to do symbolic-analytic tasks will have the highest standard of living and be the most competitive internationally."

'[The] biggest challenge we face over the long term... how to improve the earnings of America's expanding army of low-wage workers who are doing personal service jobs in hotels, hospitals, big-box retail stores, restaurant chains, and all the other businesses that need bodies but not high skills."

Two nations, two "biggest challenges", all in one.

The Up nation's biggest challenge:

"no other nation surpasses us in providing intellectual and creative experience within entire regions specializing in one or another kind of symbolic analytic work (LA for music and film, Silicon Valley for software and the Internet, greater Boston for bio-med engineering, and so on)."

"[W]e’re in danger of losing ground because too many of our kids, especially those from lower-middle class and poor families, can’t get the foundational education they need."

Comes now an very perfunctory Rx for biggest challenge #2, lifting the downer America:

"Unions could help raise their wages by giving them more bargaining leverage. A higher minimum wage and larger Earned Income Tax Credit could help as well.

"Not all of our young people can or should receive a four-year college degree, but we can do far better for them than we're doing now. At the least, every young person should have access to a year or two beyond high school, in order to gain a certificate attesting to their expertise in a particular area of technical competence. Technicians who install, upgrade, and service automated and computerized machinery -- office technicians, auto technicians, computer technicians, environmental technicians -- will be in ever-greater demand."

Then again, maybe Bobby has it all wrong. Maybe after we've destroyed the present production system and the Mittelstand earnings it threw off. as Bobby himself adds,

" -- eventually the dollar (might) drop so low that global firms will find it profitable to locate traditional manufacturing assembly (back here)in the United States. -- "

Yeah, Bobby, the Thirdies can build symbolians too, and for next to nothin' brother. But is Bobby daunted by this? Nope:

"... demand for symbolic analysts in the U.S. will continue to grow faster than the supply. Innovation creates that demand, and demand for it, in turn, generates more innovation.... It's simply wrong to assume a zero-sum game among nations. There is no finite amount of symbolic-analytic work to be parceled out around the globe. There is no limit to the capacity of the human brain to discover new problems needing to be solved, or to create better solutions to old problems. And no limit to the number of problems needing solutions."