Eating the seed corn

I was talking with a guy in China about software development. He had a copy of my resume, and mentioned that China had a lot of well-educated software engineers, but nobody with my kind of background, skills, and experience, because back when I was learning computers and electronics in the 1980's the people of China didn't have such opportunities.

Then I think of today, and wonder: do Americans today have those kinds of opportunities?

Really, the answer has to be "No." While they're more likely to have access to a computer at school or at a public library, the most likely use they'll be making of it will be googling Alyssa Milano's bra size. While the cheap computer equipment that they can buy is much better than when I was a kid -- even a $400 computer from Wal-mart has more than enough power to do anything -- the fact of the matter is that they're much more likely to have a $400 X-Box than a $400 computer in their homes. Furthermore, these are complex computers that are much more difficult to learn from top to bottom than the simple little Apple II's and Commodore 64's of my youth. The programming manual for a 6502 microprocessor was 20 pages. The programming manual for a Intel-architecture microprocessor is three volumes of approximately encyclopedia size.

Once you get past age 17, opportunities are even more limited for most Americans. Most Americans cannot afford college due to declining real incomes and rising college costs, and student loan burdens have become so horrendous that many Americans who graduate college are basically enslaved to their student loan debts for the rest of their lives. The cut-off of most grant-based aid programs in the 1980's, under Saint Ronald Reagan, means that most of the poor no longer have access to college, and George W. Bush loves the poor -- he must, given that he's created so many more of them during his regime.

Meanwhile, in China it is seen as your national duty to learn mathematics, science, and technology. And the Chinese are naturally mercantilistic -- the Chinese are the Jews of South Asia, in every country of South Asia other than Japan the mercantile class is largely Chinese just as it was Jewish in pre-Hitler Europe, and even though those mercantilistic impulses were eliminated from the mainland during the Communist era (for the record, China is no longer Communist, though it still claims to be), when China re-opened for business this huge talented bunch of merchants moved right back in.

There is still the fact that China is a creaky authoritarian dictatorship, and creaky authoritarian dictatorships rarely produce much in the way of innovation. But the fact of the matter is that they are creating their seed corn, and we are eating ours, destroying our educational system and deadening the minds of our youth in pursuit of low taxes and mindless entertainment and something for nothing. When the Chinese evolve a reasonable government -- and there's every reason to think it will happen, albeit it may be decades -- they will be in a position to rule to world. And the United States? Just another third-world banana republic, just like the ones south of the border, with a small wealthy elite and huge masses of poorly-educated servants. Maybe there will be reservations for smart people, like maybe they'll let the SF Bay area and New York City areas continue to be filled with smart people to do the things that the servants can't do and that the elite don't want to do, but the United States as it existed in the era 1945-1980, with opportunity for all, will have otherwise vanished.

- Badtux the Apocalyptic Penguin