I’ve never been very good at analyzing myself, so I’m sure I couldn’t say precisely how my thoughts have changed over the semester. I suppose what’s best reflected in my blog is my journey through many different ideas towards my final topic of discussion in my expert study. I began with a decidedly outspoken introduction, and I’d like to say that I’ve made the transition from rhetoric to research, but truth be told, I’m really still not so great at that. I can’t even make myself believe that my arguments have reached a particularly wide variety of topics. What I can at least believe is that my rather empty rhetoric has at least become more reasonable and realistic.

Most of my earlier posts (and it does continue as a theme throughout) focus much more on the morality and economic sense behind capitalism, and only briefly touch on its application to the world as a whole. In The Africa Problem, I make an argument that I still wholeheartedly believe in: people can only really be wealthy in the long term by their own merit. An undeserving heir will soon lose his fortune just as the man given a fish will go hungry the next night. Again, not much more than fustian assumptions in relation to Africa, but I’m not sure what I could cite to predict the future. What really counts here is the idea, and the reasons behind it. It’s still something that I truly believe, and I’ve written as persuasively as I can.

In We Pledge Allegiance To Bill Gates, I outline my very first idea for my expert study. I never completely abandoned it- it is more abstractly touched upon in my study- but as interested in this hypothetical scenario as I am, I felt that it was too far-fetched to write any serious paper on, or at least before it’s a fully developed idea. What comes out here, I think, is my own vision of globalization. I discuss the blurring of national boundaries to the point of the extinction of nation-states, which I know is very detached from reality, but it still illustrates how I came to view globalization as empowerment of the individual and undermining the importance of national governments. If nothing else, I’d say that I at least have a somewhat unique vision of it, even if the final result is not entirely realistic. I tend to think a lot in ideals, but that problem is addressed near the end of the blog, which I’ll get to later.

A bit later on in the semester, I realized something very grounding. After reading The Communist Manifesto, I wrote Marx off as being outdated for writing not about capitalism in a free society, but about oppressive and exclusive aristocracies. It didn’t take me long to see that it wasn’t as outdated as it sounded. America has its own, somewhat unintentional aristocracy, created by the lack of opportunity and education for the children of the poor. Yes, I am from a wealthier area, and that is a lot of why I believe what I believe, but not for the reasons you’d instantly think. I’ve known many awful, stupid, almost sub-human children have their way paid for them because their parents were wealthy, and they get all if not more of everything I do, no matter how hard I work. It’s like a communist idea hidden inside a laissez-faire aristocracy. It still makes me absolutely sick to see these people going to great colleges while I have to think of the brilliant people doomed to low-income households and opportunities. One very important distinction I then had to make was that aristocracy is not the capitalist ideal. I’m safe; I’m still just as capitalist as I thought I was, but what’s not capitalist is our own social structure. From this little train of thought sprung a firm belief that people should be judged not by their background, but by their own merit. If this means that someone who was poor takes whatever place I might have had because they’re better than me, so be it. It’s for the best that someone better than me be higher up; I’ll just have to work harder. Of course, that ideal is not entirely realistic, but I argue in that same post that we at least have to take steps to see that it’s closer to reality.

Another idea I touch upon is the philosophy of global egalitarianism, and thus begin my anti-nationalist rants. For the first time I argue the idea which I eventually turn into a pillar of my later arguments: our world is now set up in an aristocracy of wealth by nation, but no American has a birthright to a job. In a truly egalitarian and capitalist world, there are fabulously wealthy in Mongolia and terribly poor in America, but everyone deserves to be where they are. Another ideal, but it’s the thought that counts when building a frame of mind.

From that point, I jump away from my economic defenses of capitalism towards more attacks on nationalism, collectivism, and elitism. I found that there are quite a number of isms that I dislike. There was still not much there but rhetoric, but how does one research culture? I do poorly enough researching numbers and statistics, so how could I research the cultural attitudes of America? The short answer is: I didn’t. What I hope I did at least do is make logical and convincing arguments. As far as American patriotism goes, I think I did a decent job making a sensible and persuasive argument.

What I realized one very early morning in Sleep Is For People Who Don’t Have Enough To Think About is that my original idea for my expert study and the one I’d finally come to were really not terribly different. I wrote about free trade and notions of nationalism, but thought also that this tied in closely with the idea of blurred national boundaries, that is, globalization as the anti-nationalizer. An interesting question that arose in my mind, if not on paper, is: does globalization kill nationalism or does it require anti-nationalism to flourish, or both?

After writing my first draft I came back to the topic of education, following a conversation I’d had earlier that day with Dean Rucker. He had some interesting points about how education is greatly influenced by world events, and this is not a new thing. I was very happy to learn that Mandarin will be offered next year, but also saw the greater implications of this in terms of education. Global trends mixed with traditional education produces students who will not only be effective thinkers at home, but very capable abroad. This is still a part of the cultural aspect, which I clarify more in Substantivist Economics. I felt that my writing in that post was returning to more irrational terms, but I think I generally clarified the concept, at least.

All in all, I’m not terribly pleased with my writing over the semester. I believe every word I’ve said with all of my heart, but I don’t feel as though I presented it very effectively. It reads like “I think this” and “I think that,” but I at least think that I presented everything in a reasonably logical fashion. It turns out that I’m really not as brilliant as I thought, but that only means I’ll have to work harder- and isn’t that really it? No one can coast along without constantly striving to improve, neither in this fifteen person seminar nor in the 6.6 billion person flat world.

Now this is interesting.  Quite the contrary to what we usually hear, isn’t it?  According to USA Today, while it is true that millions of low-skill manufacturing jobs have gone overseas, more than 80% of manufacturers in America say they suffer from a severe lack of skilled workers.  These are high-skill positions, but it’s important to note that they don’t require any college degree at all.  In fact, many employers are offering free training to anyone who will agree to work these relatively well-paying positions.  Mike Bunner says in the article, “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.  When I was a kid, people would stand in line for hours for an opportunity at a job like I have available.  I can’t get people to show up for an interview.”  So if these jobs are available, why aren’t people taking them?

Well, all the commotion about factory closings and job outsourcing sure isn’t encouraging anyone to take these positions.  The public perception of manufacturing jobs are low-class, dirty, and repetitive also hurt employment numbers.  America’s not yet ready to become a completely service-oriented economy, not by a long-shot, but it looks like people can’t distinguish between unskilled assembly line labor and skilled manufacturing work.  These employment shortages are hurting the growth of certain manufacturing industries which are not yet able to move for whatever reasons.

So here’s my question: with 43% of the entire manufacturing labor force 45 years or older, a percent that keeps getting steadily larger, do we want to encourage youth to go into these industries?  It’s clear that they need new employees who are willing to work in skilled labor, but as we move towards service-based industry, is this a field which we want to encourage?  I say yes, it is, because businesses like Mike Bunner’s Electro Chemical Engineering can’t feasibly outsource at this time.  We’re still far from being a complete service economy- in fact, the idea is still a bit far fetched- so we need to make sure that these good jobs aren’t being left alone.  Working with your hands and working with your mind aren’t mutually exclusive, but I think that people generally see it that way.  Realistically, for the time being, we still need a good proportion of lawyers to plastic welders.

A large foundation of my study is Karl Polanyi’s idea of “substantivist economics.” To grossly paraphrase, it says that there are two sides to economics. The first side is the completely rational and real side of numbers, facts, and theories; this is formalist economics, the study of economics based on utility under conditions of scarcity. In my study, this is where free trade sits. It’s the best economic system for both individuals and the world as a whole, as far as cold facts and figures go. The flip side is substantivist economics, the anthropological aspect of it: some decisions which are not necessarily logical, made by humans based on their cultural perceptions. This, I write, is where the popular American perception of globalization is. Although the global free market is clearly superior by numbers, people are very hesitant to accept it as a good thing. Indeed, “outsourcing” and even “capitalism” are both words to which negative connotations are attached in popular culture. Why does this happen? Polanyi explains how religion, government, and socio-cultural values and obligations factor into these choices often. While from a cultural standpoint, many of these obligations may not be seen as irrational, but they do nonetheless detract from the factuality of formalist economics.

I want to clarify this a bit before moving on, because as I’ve said, this is grossly paraphrased. Polanyi’s book, The Great Transformation, refers to the divide between market-driven capitalist economics and centralized redistribution systems. Polanyi argues that the substantivist approach applies to both systems, but is the exclusive approach to the latter. But then, it could be easily argued that socialism isn’t really an economic theory anyway, but a social theory. As such, formalist economics cannot be used to analyze it. Market systems, however, are driven both by these substantivist means and rational decisions of self-interest.

What substantivist economics is not about, however, is saying “Oh well, that’s just culture. Guess we’ll go that way.” What it tries to do is understand why people veer from the most logical course and doom themselves in the process. In the case of outsourcing, it’s easy to see why one might oppose it, despite the truth behind what Greg Mankiw had to say about it. In fact, that incident is a fantastic example of the “substantivist shift” towards opposing logic. Mankiw committed a major Washington faux pas: stating the blatant truth. He committed political suicide because though what he had to say was absolutely right, it was not what people wanted to hear. But that’s not even the root of it. Why wasn’t it what people wanted to hear? Well, the general media, for one, greatly exaggerates the “problem” of outsourcing and puts a spin on the pro-business crowd. After Mankiw’s comments, headlines began to appear about the Bush-supported flight of “American jobs,” as if a job were an inherent right to an American, not to be stolen by a foreigner. The media can’t drill an idea into Americans’ brains merely by suggestion, but it’s sure a great catalyst. “Outsourcing” quickly became a buzzword in the early 2000s and turned into an easy scapegoat for economic discontents, though it’s hardly the cause of any real problems there may be.

America’s popular values based on need as opposed to pure merit combined with collectivist attitudes of American pride also contradict the ideas behind international free trade. Americans need steel working jobs to support their families, big soulless companies don’t need to increase their profit margins .06%. That’s probably true, but you know what else is true? Indians need jobs. Indonesians need jobs. Americans don’t necessarily deserve jobs any more than they do. This, of course, is never recognized, because the idol of need is only enshrined in America. Our collectivist pride fosters a social “obligation” to help our own, when by the numbers, the economic policies to support that are bad for us as a whole.

So what is it? What causes people to put up shields against the good to leave the way open for the bad? I can’t believe it’s only the greed or short-sightedness of the protected; I try to have more faith in man than that. My best guess is that people simply don’t know. Their leaders don’t want to say anything, because politicians can’t go against popular opinion. The media won’t say anything, because sensationalism is good television. No one will listen to businessmen or economists, because wealth is a soulless pursuit, obviously. Although people are very open to cultural globalization, global free trade is frowned upon as the cause of all the suffering of poor countries. That’s hardly true, so why is that the opinion? And how can people know otherwise? I hate to say it, because it is my paper, but if no one will listen to the only people willing to speak the truth, then I’m afraid I don’t have a solution. The best I can hope is that as time passes, this transition becomes more accepted and people will begin to become educated about what is truly going on.

In a conversation with Dean Rucker yesterday, I learned that Mandarin programs will indeed be beginning at Mary Washington next year. This was very exciting news for me, but of course, these classes will most likely be immediately filled by upperclassmen. Hopefully I can at least start in my junior year, oh well. Anyway, this led into a very interesting discussion about how the global political and economic climate very much influences education curricula here at home. For instance, the new Arabic program at UMW is of course in response to our involvement in the Middle East. While I’d much rather get involved with Chinese trade than Arabic war, it’s still great that the university is ready to teach students what they need to know not only to reach their potential domestically but be very flexible globally. Maybe it was a little late on Mandarin, but better late than never. It’s not a stretch to state that (apart from English) Mandarin will be the most useful language to know in the business world in coming decades.

This trend in education reacting to the world was illustrated also during the Cold War, in which, of course, there was an influx of Russian programs in public schools. Upon the collapse of the Soviet Union, so too did collapse our public Russian programs. They quickly began to disappear from high schools and while they’re certainly not gone, they’re much less common than they once were. This is a good thing, though. We can’t teach everything that global operators could possibly need to know, but we should make an effort to stick with global trends. Even if China collapses in five years and Russia becomes an economic powerhouse (very hypothetical scenario), we’ll at least have been prepared for the most likely result. There are two goals now in education, I think.

1. Provide students with a diverse, “untouchable” education to give the ability to reach their best potential in whatever field in which that may turn out to be.

2. Prepare students to operate globally in concordance with current and expected global trends.

The first has always been a fundamental goal of education: preparing students for the world in which they’ll operate (domestically). But though it’s been happening probably longer than we realize, it becomes more and more important every day that students are prepared for the much larger and literal “world.”