Today’s changing world may surprise you…

* The U.S. imports two to three times as many jobs as we export. Those jobs are created by foreign companies establishing manufacturing facilities in the U.S. and employing American workers.

* The U.S. remains the cheapest place in the world to produce for many of the more advanced industries, because employee benefits are much cheaper and American workers are more flexible than in Europe. In the future, direct labor costs will take a backseat to “invisible” costs such as pensions, benefits, health care, and “reporting costs” like complying with regulations, taxation, and labor relations.

* Outsourcing will create greater efficiencies and productivity for today’s companies employing knowledge workers.

* Those who have concern about the higher-education system and lack of people studying technology in the U.S., forget that this is the only country with a very significant continuing-education system. Surprisingly, our most important educational system is in the employee’s own organization.

* We are in a transition. For educated young people there is no problem, but for immigrants who are only qualified for yesterday’s jobs there exists a mismatch of skills.

* Manufacturing production in this country has doubled in the past ten years, even as factory employment has gone down. The improvement is due to more systemization that requires less unskilled labor.

* Our biggest problem today is the nation’s total dependence on foreign money to cover our government debt, which is unprecedented in economic history. We have no experience with what will happen when the U.S. owes so much debt that we’ll be forced to devalue the dollar. But, sooner or later, we’re going to find out.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 11th, 2007 at 1:22 am and is filed under Global Environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.