"When philosophy paints its grey in grey then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk." -- G.W.F. Hegel, 'Preface', Philosophy of Right.
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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx
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responding to globalization
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June 18, 2010
Globalization is here to stay. It cannot be rolled back. But that does not mean that we must allow it to roll over Australian businesses and workers as happened in the 1980s and 1990s.
In The Next Globalization in Issue 10 Fall 2008 of Democracy A Journal of Ideas Robert Shapiro makes an interesting point about globalization in the American context:
globalization, and America’s responses to it, have helped drive not only the extraordinary economic progress of China and other developing nations but rapid productivity gains in the United States as well and, until very recently, healthy growth and low inflation. But there’s bad news, too. Globalization is also implicated in the historic slowdown in U.S. job creation, the flat incomes of most American working families, and the recent roller-coaster prices of many assets and commodities, from housing to oil.
He adds that as China and a score of other developing nations become production-and-assembly platforms for much of the world’s manufacturing, that sector has declined precipitously in the United States. Now, America’s critical contribution in the global economy is the development and application of new ideas, including not only new technologies, materials, products and processes, but also new ways of financing, marketing, and distributing goods and services, and new ways of organizing a business and managing a workplace.
In an "idea-based economy" he adds:
the only Americans who will get ahead in the coming decades will be those who can work effectively with the ideas that create value and wealth, in workplaces dense with the technologies that organize, transmit and communicate those ideas. Yet, by one recent estimate, nearly half of Americans cannot handle basic computer and Internet-based systems. The results are evident in patterns of growing inequality
How to address this inequality in an information economy?
Schapiro's answer is interesting and doable:
make computer- and Internet-related skills universally available, because decent-paying jobs that do not require these capacities are becoming increasingly rare. The good news is that it won’t be hard to do. In 1996, I urged the White House to support a new initiative to give grants to community colleges to keep their computer labs open and staffed in the evenings and on weekends, for any adult to walk in and receive computer and Internet training for free. It wouldn’t even cost very much–perhaps $150 million a year today–because the facilities, equipment, and instructors are already in place
In Australia we do not hear much about the high education system offering any worker advanced as well as basic computer and Internet training. All we have in our "education revolution" is the provision of inexpensive laptops for schools not the provision of basic computer and Internet training for the working population.
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| | Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:24 PM | Permalink |
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