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Friday, April 29, 2005

"...and even if you do fix them, I can hire Indians for 1/3 the price"
Posted by Jill | 9:34 AM
The inimitable Tom Friedman, prefect of the Flat Earth Society, has yet another of his "Hooray for Outsourcing" pieces in today's New York Times, this one inspired by Bill "The Hell with the Gays" Gates' comment at a recent governors' conference, which Friedman translates as "If we don't fix American education, I will not be able to hire your kids."

Now, Bill Gates certainly has a point about American education, though not for the reasons he or Friedman claim. The biggest problem is not that schools can't teach kids what they need to know; it's the pressures from the fundamentalist right AGAINST teaching kids what they need to know. For the so-called tech jobs of the future (which Friedman doesn't seem to realize are already the tech jobs of the past), kids are going to need to be able to think and reason, and they'll need a good solid foundation in math and science (read: FACTS). The problem is that the Christofascists want to implement Bible-based education nationwide, and let's face it: The Bible has little to do with established fact.

Of course Gates couldn't come out and SAY this, not after caving to a bantam rooster of a Christofascist preacher and withdrawing support for a gay rights bill, but that's the truth.

The other problem, of course, is money, and with C-Plus Caligula and his Congressional acolytes funneling ever more money into the pockets of the wealthy and corporations, there's less federal money available for eduction, which means the states have to pay more, and since they don't want to, it means higher property taxes, at which communities nationwide balk.

But even if the educational system COULD be brought up to the kinds of standards that would create the sort of workers that Gates and his compatriots crave, said workers will still have one strong strike against them: They are Americans, which means that in return for keeping their skills up to date by continually learning new skills, often on their own time and with their own money, and for working the 80-hour weeks that are characteristic of engineers at companies like Microsoft, they want to be well-compensated. And that's where it all falls apart. Friedman seems to think that engineers in China and India are racing to the top, rather than American engineers racing to the bottom, but with the degree of wage gap that currently exists, any kind of levelling is a long way off -- and when wages reach a point of equilibrium among, say, the U.S., India, and China, they will be far lower than those to which most college-educated Americans are accustomed.

Now, it may very well be that Americans' high standard of living is unsustainable, in which case guys like Friedman ought to come out and admit that the future of the American workplace looks like a high-tech version of a 19th century sweatshop, rather than trying to convince us that Bill Gates' lobbying to lift the H-1B cap is about anything other than corporate profit.
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