Round World? Flat World? Spiky World?

From Gordon Houseworth @ Intellectual Capital Group blog

It is clear to a growing number of US nationals that our failure to keep abreast of scientific and technical education and research and to build and retain a substantive manufacturing capacity in those emerging sectors is going to soon put the US on the declining end of the robust nationality of other states. The most piercing analysis of the implications of offshoring rise from Alan Blinder (former vice chairman, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and former member of the Council of Economic Advisers, now at Princeton). Unlike many economists whose works seem remote from politics, Blinder blends them both in what I submit are essential reading to understanding the economic and political implications of offshoring. The horizon is not attractive.

Comparative advantage is the name of the game and ours has been allowed to lapse. Always an obscure concept save for economists, comparative advantage is not well understood by lay readers and certainly not by those whose jobs move overseas. Blinder does as good a job as I've seen in presenting economics in political human scale. All things being equal, world per capita incomes will indeed level in globalization. The US will have a painful economic and political adjustment for its failure to retain its advantage. From Blinder's Fear of Offshoring:

The furor over [N. Gregory] Mankiw’s remarks [on offshoring for which he was excoriated in the press and by Congress] was grotesquely out of proportion to the current importance of offshoring, which is still largely a prospective phenomenon. While we have no reliable national data on the extent of offshoring, the fragmentary studies that have been done to date have concluded that fewer than a million U.S. service-sector jobs have been lost to offshoring up to now. A million jobs may sound like a lot. But in the gigantic U.S. labor market, with its rapid turnover, a million jobs is less than two week’s normal gross job losses.

But here’s the great irony. Looking to the future, I believe that Mankiw and other economists who interpret offshoring as nothing more than international business as usual are greatly underestimating both its importance and its disruptive impact on Western societies. Sometimes quantitative change is so large that it brings about qualitative change. Indeed, I will argue in this paper that we have barely seen the tip of an offshoring iceberg that, as the rest of it is revealed, may prove to be something to behold.

Excellent and well-linked article by Gordon showing the dangers of credentialism and breathing your own fumes (Friedman, et al.) You can easily extrapolate from the National comparative advantage standpoint many of the arguments of Richard Florida's "Creative Class" as relates to regional and local competitiveness. Gee, when I scribbled on it last March, I think I called it "Whither Comparative Advantage?" Bottom line: this shit ain't hard to get your ghead around, if you can lose the blinkers that "credentialing" and the self-talk that our homogenous groups and their agendas can impose on the quality of our assessments and understanding. Occam was right. And Friedman and friends are talking themselves into believing the smooth sustainability of their new paradigm, all evidence of human history and desire to the contrary. As Mike Dewitt of Spooky Action can tell you, those basics we should always remebember to get to real truth and its drivers are the verities of R-Complex:

The Meta of business

WIIFM
MMFI

What's in it for me? Make me feel important. Those are not about greed or narcissim, not really. Not hardly. If business and business schools spent one third of their time asking and answering those questions meaningfully within the tripartite markets of their shareholders, consumers and employees things might hang together a bit more coherently and resonantly. Especially in the rough times. I know that when I have the chance to present such questions in my work, the answers seem to satisfy without us having to resort to bonus, a fleet of Benzes for managers, or couponing and slotting-fee-ing ourselves to chapter 11.

Force or flow. Artificial or natural order. The meta of business is really, right now, the denial of the pattern language of people. We are the molecules of business matter. And often unobserved, unsanctioned in our real motives and desires. Ignored. I can see what makes the molecules hang together and hold me up on this Aeron chair I sit on only if I look really closely. And not with everyday eyes. And even then, I can only measure the hyperphysical: the electric charge or the paths they leave. I can't actually see them: energy is invisible. And, in many ways, it is meta.

The characteristics between atoms are invisible when we look from a distance, and when we insist on observing that way. People, the soft molecules of business are no different. They have patterns that aren't scientific, aren't on some chart in some business school. But they are somewhat knowable. If we know what to look for. And where. And why.

Once we do that, the "how" always comes. Like an epiphany.