:. But I think it is true that Americans are going to have to become more educated on average to compete. Maybe that's a good thing? I don't know.
:Once could argue that we should be trying to pull ourselves to higher level jobs than assembling widgets. I think the problem is that we've finally moved past a stage where even being educated isn't going to help. As long as we're doing any type of work at all, we'll be asking for too high of a salary compared to these other countries. We went from an agricultural to a manufacturing economy, and then in the 70's/80's packed up our factories and moved to a design/technology based economy. But now here's the major problem- in the last few years the new trend is to move the design centers and administrative centers to these other countries also and become and intellectual property/ownership based economy, and I think that's a majorly bad move. Now not only to they have the factories, they have the administrative building, and now they're going to have the design center, too. Right now the US companies are still happy because they own this stuff and are profiting from this business model. But soon these countries are going to wise up and realize that THEY have the factory, THEY are designing the products, and THEY are doing all the administration of the company...and what do they need us for? We are making the bad move of depending on these countries to respect our position of ownership and do all the work for us, and I don't trust them. Intellectual property/ownership is not tangible, there is nothing stopping someone from stealing it or just saying it was theirs to begin with. Whereas before you couldn't steal a cornfield and become a corn exporter, or you couldn't steal a car factory and begin selling cars, nowadays you CAN steal ideas and sell them as your own, and it'll be very easy for them since they're the ones that are supposed to be coming up with ideas for your company, engineering the design, and producing it. I think in the coming years you'll begin to see the skilled workers we trained in those other countries abandon US companies and begin going into business for themselves, using design, manufacturing and administrative methods which we trained them in years ago in the trust that they'd be working for us.
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