Pundita on getting unstuck

Pundita has a very interesting and entertaining post up: Getting Unstuck: Part 5, Stuck at the Intersection of Government and the Mass Age. I strongly recommend that you read it. I won’t analyze what she has to say but I do have some random observations I’d like to add. Pundita writes:

Then maybe we haven’t read the same arguments. Gates views the individual American hi-tech worker as in competition with individual hi-tech workers in other countries. This simply isn’t the case in the key instances. The worker and the college student in free societies are in competition with authoritarian governments that control the education and work choices of their citizens. I touched on this situation in the Pharaoh essay.

And even in countries such as India and Romania where the citizens can say ‘no’ to their government about job and study choices, the government usually subsidizes education in hi-tech fields and/or supplements by one means or another the pittance that their workers receive from Western firms. In some cases the pittance is actually no pay; the government wants them to work for free for the Western firms just to get the technology/information transfer. All this is a modern version of the Plantation economy.

So how is the American worker supposed to compete with workers who will work for free or for peanuts? This is what the American worker is in competition with—the Plantation and Pharaoh governments, not “individual” foreign workers.

And the ”investments” that Microsoft and other American businesses are making in China and India are naïve to the point of funny if they weren’t scary. India and China will throw them out at the first opportunity.

This observation has some real resonance with me. Some years ago I attended a meeting that included quite a few high-powered types at the company for which I worked at the time. The purpose of the meeting was to announce a new plan for the company’s involvement with China. They were planning to put a substantial investment into operations there. I think that I was there because they wanted me to go over there. After listening politely I stood up and said “If I’m not mistaken I’m the only one in this room who reads, writes,
or speaks any Chinese at all. Believe me, these guys are going to take
you to the cleaners and you’ll never see a dime of profit from your
investment. You see a market of a billion people. Wrong. The
market is a couple of hundred very rich people.”

Pundita has another interesting point when she writes:

If US foreign policy comes in line with the general statements Bush has made, I’ll have no major gripes. But so far we don’t have policy in a lot of areas; we have talk. And even the talk has been flagrantly contradicted by some recent State Department actions. If the US weren’t at war, I’d have more criticisms than ones I’ve voiced on this blog. But I have to assume that Bush is getting sound counsel from military advisors, which could explain some of the gaps between public statements and actions.

My concern is that the US war on terror, which I find justifiable in the way it’s been prosecuted so far, will morph into a cold war that provides cover for bad US foreign policy. This time, though, the policy would be playing out in a world that’s vastly changed from the one during the Cold War era. A world that’s vastly more difficult for a few rich nations to control, let alone manage.

I’m a dissident on this subject since I’m very much opposed to an eternity of low-level conflict. That will inevitably lead to changes in this country that I simply don’t want to see. Not to mention the points that Pundita makes here. I’ve already lived through one Cold War. That’s enough.

Pundita writes:

The traditional philosophical arguments for democracy overlook that the problems of the Mass Age are too numerous and complex for a small number of people—a governing elite—to solve. My argument for democracy is grounded in the empirical observation that true democratic government, which allows many people to participate at the problem-solving level, is the only form of government capable of effectively administering to the needs of mega-populations.

I’ve written about this before in my posts “Emergent Phenomena”, “Jacksonians, Wilsonians, and Hamiltonians at war”, and “Angel in the whirlwind”. Attempts at central planning whether in totalitarian Soviet Russia or the bureaucratic European Union have several problems in handling problems effectively and expeditiously. Perhaps the most important of these is informational: the very mechanism of its operation obscures the market information that’s necessary to make an efficient choice. There’s something similar at work in any top-down technocracy: no expert is so expert that he or she is smarter than the aggregate wit, wisdom, and experience of the crowd.

Pundita continues:

Yet clearly humanity is at crossroads. Several of today’s biggest social problems are highly complex and interconnected via conditions set in motion and reinforced by the policies of transnational organizations and trade practices.

Of course, that observation is the theme song of the anti-globalists. But if governments are to be charged with finding and implementing solutions, they must move away from tradition-bound, rigidly enforced civil service routines and embrace strategies used in the private business sectors. And they must rely less on political ideology and theorizing and more on systems that provide constantly updated data and analysis. That’s something the anti-globalists don’t want to hear—at least, not the ones I’ve spoken with. They still think a gussied-up socialist ideaology can save the world.

This is a problem that bureaucracies simply cannot escape. Every bureaucracy is standards-based and standards are intrinsically retrospective rather than prospective. It’s the nature of the beast. And why even with the brightest people it’s difficult to get creative solutions from a bureaucracy.

It’s also the reason that the Democratic Party’s ongoing commitment to be the party of Fordism concerns me.

You can’t really get the full message that Pundita is conveying here from the few snippets I’ve extracted. By all means go and read the whole thing.