Date: 2024-12-21 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00021701
TPB COMMUNICATION
PAUL ZEITZ
DRAFT ... There is a massive amount of writing and talking, but little of it is useful for management and effective action. What to do?
PAUL ZEITZ
DRAFT ... There is a massive amount of writing and talking, but little of it is useful for management and effective action. What to do?
Dear Paul
Thank you for keeping me in your interesting and important circle of folk that are concerned about matters that should be of concern to everyone.
I cannot pretend to be an effective communicator, but I have been quite good at identifying problems and the strategic goals needed to fix them. I have applied them to corporate problems and to development and humanitarian relief around the world but not to government and society within the United States. At my age, all that activity has ended, and my concern and interest is now focused on the catastrophic decline in the US socio-enviro-economic system.
The article penned by Joe Concha may well be factually correct. I do not have the means to do a meaningful 'fact check' but it seems to fit what I have been sensing for quite a long while. So I have two questions: (1) why does the performance of the Biden administration seem so bad? and (2) what practical steps can be taken to change the political trajectory so that actual performance of US politics and the US socio-enviro-economic system improves?
In my view ... and the data shows ... that America's performance (social, environmental and economic) has been on the decline since the early 1980s. I attribute some of this to an ineffective US response to the OPEC oil shock of 1973 which ended the international competitiveness of most of the US industrial base and related infrastructure. 40 years ago half of the population of the USA earned less than the average and half earned more than the average ... a fairly normal distribution around the average. In the recent past about 80% have been earning less than the average and only 20% earning more than the average. In other words, inequality has gotten totally out of control.
Worse ... in this 40+ years, the economy has been stimulated by deficit spending ... not deficit spending at the government level, but deficit spending at the household level. Most American households have been losing net wealth year on year for years, and the business community has done well from this stimulated consumption. When things got rough, for the banks (most notably around 2008) the government helped them survive, and the chronic financialization of the modern economy kept on going.
Worse again ... the economic rise of China has been funded by the US based private business sector and financial interests. After the OPEC oil shock it became difficult if not impossible to have a profitable business based on American manufacturing where energy was no longer exceptionally low priced and wages (and worker productivity) were the highest in the world. In the 1980s there was a massive exodus of manufacturing from the USA to low wage countries ... much of it to China and other low wage Asian countries. To my mind, the American business community was fast and loose in its attitude to intellectual property which no longer was able to deliver a unique competitive advantage to the USA even though much of it had been financed by US Government largesse!
I travelled extensively around Canada and the United States as a young university student in the summer vacations of 1960 and 1961 when the US Interstate Highway system was being built, and the factories were the most productive in the world ... and the pollution of the rivers the worst. Before those visits I had no idea that there were 'race' problems in the USA, and I recall writing an essay on 'US Apartheit' when I got back to college.
Subsequently, I became an economic migrant to the United States in 1966 at a time when the American worker was being paid more in one month than workers in the UK and Europe were earning in a year. Such was the economic wealth of the (white) American people compared to the rest of the industrialized world.
My family was not wealthy, but we were in the professional middle class. My father was the Headmaster of State School and I was given a good education at Blundells, an English private Boarding School and subsequently at Cambridge. I did not have any interaction with any black person until I was at Cambridge where I became friendly with a number of students from various parts of Africa.
During my visit to Canada and the United States I interacted with many people of my own age. In Canada we compared what I was being taught compared to Canadian students and concluded that I was about a year ahead of the Canadians. Later, when I travelled with Canadians through much of the USA we did the same exercise with American students and concluded that the Canadians were about a year ahead of the Americans. Because out school year started a little bit after the American school year I was still in the USA and travelling around the country when the schools re-opened in the fall. I was fascinated by all the yellow school buses and the way all the traffic had to stop when the bus stopped. It prompted the phrase 'In America everything stops for the children!' which was not intended as a compliment. Rather it referenced the idea that young people in America was 'spoilt rotten' compared to young people in other countries, were pampered and given a poor education that was increasingly useless for the modern world!