Look, could America have avoided creating "China"?
Only if they could stop other players from doing so. And if America at its zenith couldn't, neither can China as it is today.
Can China stop the other players from creating "New India"? You don't go, South Korea, Japan, Singapore will come in and they will profit from it. You go, you collect some money, they collect less.
Stop thinking of some European engineer going around acting as some big fat pukka sahib and not being productive, someone created this imagery and it has for the worse, shaped this discussion. Think of Kim Hyun Lee, Watanabe Goro, Lim Huat Kong who will work hard and smart.
China either achieves Germany's standards or be screwed like the US. The race is on. Don't freaking drop the ball now.
Nobody owes the Americans a living. Same of us Chinese. If the Chinese Immortals will come to stand above the India Yogis, its because they beat them at every step of the game.
Why Germany Has It So Good -- and Why America Is Going Down the Drain | Economy | AlterNet
McNally: Given the fact that we work more, are we more productive?
Geoghegan: If you consider productivity as output per hour, working longer probably decreases it. My friend Isabelle came to the US to attend grad school at Northwestern, and was upset when she discovered there were no holidays here. In the middle of the year, I found her very stressed, and I figured out what was happening: she was working American hours with German efficiency. When you look at the fact that Germans rank at the top of the world in terms of export sales -- on a par with the Chinese who work till they drop -- you realize they must be doing something that makes them more efficient.
Leisure time also has material value. The fact that Americans work longer and longer hours increases GDP per capita, but it doesn't necessarily raise our standard of living.
McNally: Americans don't know how things actually work in European countries. For many people the fact that Germany is neck and neck with China as the number one exporting country -- give or take the rise and fall of currency - must be mind blowing. Even progressives in America don't look overseas for models that work. I find it almost pathological that our exceptionalism infects even those who assume they don't believe in it.
...
McNally: You say the three building blocks of German social democracy are the works councils, the election of boards of directors by workers as well as by hedge fund managers, and the regional wage setting institutions.
Geoghegan: First: work councils. The analogy I used in the book is fictitious: Imagine you elect a works council from among the employees at the Barnes & Noble bookstore where you work. They don't bargain for wages, that's done by the unions; but they have all sorts of rights that relate to working time, who gets laid off, even whether the store is going to close or not. They can go in and look at the books. The management has to enter into agreements. The works council can't dictate, but they have enormous influence over what working hours will be, who's going to work when and how.
Co-determined boards are mandated at German companies with 2000 employees or more, the global companies that are beating us, although you can have them in other situations. These are maybe more like super boards that don't do as much day-to-day managing as our boards of directors do. It consists one half of people elected by and from the workers, and one half elected by the shareholders.
The chairman of the board is selected by the shareholders and has a double vote so that, if there's a tie between the shareholders and the employees, the shareholders win. But it creates a lot of potential influence over how the debate goes.
McNally: But you also say that the shoe is on the other foot when it comes to choosing the CEO, correct?
Geoghegan: If the shareholders are divided on who should be the next CEO, the clerks get to pick the king.
McNally: In contract negotiations over the last 10, 15, 20 years, American workers have been giving back things, agreeing to two tiers, lowering their pension guarantees. I've never heard of any of them trading a concession for the right to elect members to the board.
Geoghegan: The UAW had somebody on the board once.
McNally: Management can't even say it won't work because Germany's beating our pants in manufacturing, and the codetermined board is also spreading elsewhere, right?
Geoghegan: The German model has made inroads on the US model in other European countries.
McNally: You quote the German labor minister saying, "Our biggest export now is co-determination". Now, third: regional or sector wage settling.
...
McNally: You point out that as globalization grew, the US chose to compete on the basis of cheap labor by outsourcing. We kept the marketing and executives here and moved the manufacturing elsewhere. We've been playing that game for 20-30 years now. Germany chose to play the opposite game.
Geoghegan: 30 years later the Germans are making money off of China, and China is making big time money off of us. One thing I really try to get across in the book: Many Americans think that we've got a trade deficit because we can't compete with China. We've got a trade deficit because we can't compete with Germany in selling things to China. Until people wake up and look at the kinds of things that the Germans are doing to keep their manufacturing base, we're going to continue to run deficits which leave us in the clutches of foreign creditors and compromise our autonomy as a country.
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Regardless of whether India overcomes its own challenges, there will be other challengers. So kicking the sh*t out of the USA is just the beginning.
Right, we are past the USA, next target, be better than Germany!
Rich country -> country of rich people!
Bruce Lee once drew a line of a blackboard.
How, he asked the audience, do you make this line smaller.
Someone step up, took the duster and erase part of the lie.
Bruce Lee said, wrong. You do this.
He drew another line longer than the first.
Nepal, etc. There are far more economic benefit.
