get your technology stolen - and make a career of it

we love technology. we use it every day to travel, communicate, live, eat, drink, have a nice life. but clouds are brewing over our consumer paradise. aren't we are all noticing that more and more of the products we hold in our hands are made in fewer and fewer countries? turn over any object in your home, how many have "made in china" printed on their back? there is much concern in the west that this means that one day we will no longer be able to compete and lose our jobs. i am more optimistic than that, and here is why:

1. what many forget is that this is nothing new. the ancient romans loved to rant about how their jobs were taken away by the cheap labor in persia...
   currently, aided by smart joint-venture laws, it is china that is absorbing a lot of technology from the west.
   does that make it ok to point the finger? well, only recently, way into the 20th century, the US loved to steal technology from germany (steel manufacturing, machines, chemistry, pharmacology [aspirin], or more recently, wind turbines). in the late 19th century, germany stole technology from britain (steam engine, steel, railroad) and finally, from the 14th up until about the 18th century, all europe just loved to steal technology from the americas, india and... china (agriculture, drugs, weaving, silk, porcelain, explosives). all civilizations had jobs and technology "stolen" from them at some time. was it really that which made people suffer? or was it perhaps bigger socioeconoic issues, industrialization, and the willingness of governments to go to war? in spite of this, did the world's civilization really stop? or did it instead move inexorably ever forward?
   
   
   
   want to buy one? yeah, didn't think so.
   [froogle.google.com]



2. will the world end or will we just adapt, innovate, and live happily ever after? as an educated, intelligent individual, do you want to invent once, then watch while your employer lazily makes a ton of cash with your invention? well, it won't happen, and that's unavoidable, if you like it or not. instead, you will need to continue innovating feverishly to stay ahead. and that's what makes your employer need you, that's what makes your career.
   
   
   
   innovation.
   [netflix.com]

so it seems that thanks to competition, the salt in the soup of capitalism, be it fair or unfair, you have a career. don't worry about technology passing hands. technology that exists is yesterday's technology that you just gave to your employer. it's the technology in your head and short time to market that gives you your livelihood, if you play it right. maybe one day, you will invent "amazing new product X" out of a combination of existing technologies that no-one else had the imagination and creativity to combine. will it be useful? YES! will the owners of those technologies want a piece of the pie? sure, but let your lawyers work out how to share the proceeds. they have families to feed, too. at the end of the day, all the bickering in the media is about which multinational corporation makes more money. do you care? or do you care about division of labor giving you the best product at the best price, and competition moving the market ever forward to give you new, amazing possibilities to enhance your life every day? and, who knows, maybe, just maybe, lift untold millions of people up to a standard of living that is enjoyable rather than the struggle they currently endure?

[that said, you should steer well clear of actually helping that natural process of dissemination of technology, as that would make you have negative value to your employer and you would be out of a career before you could even consider the legal implications. no, this post is not a call for action, it is to make you realize that you have nothing to worry about.]

UPDATE: for an interesting u-turn on the china blame game, check out this TIME article from Jan 2010 blaming foreign investors for american bankers' lack of discipline and, on the opposite end, this recent TIME article saying that china is doing what anyone would do. after all, if your trade balance is doing just fine, is your currency really that undervalued?

conservative reformers vs. left-wing conservationists

Seeing recent election results in other countries, does it appear that Europe's conservatives are the better socialists? At least that's what the recent New York Times article, "In Bad Times for Capitalism, Socialists in Europe Suffer" says.

In 1957, the German conservatives went into the federal election with the slogan "No Experiments". This was at a time when massive economic changes made every political move an experiment anyway, but I digress. In 2009, the slogan "We Have the Strength" - intriguingly, a loose translation of Obama's "Yes We Can" - hands German conservatives a big win.

"No Experiments" can still be heard from conservative politians, although the failure of financial markets makes the need for reforms obvious. Record bailouts, carried by conservatives and liberals alike, show that this need is recognized and met. What then makes "No Experiments" so successful?

Germany has turned grayish-black

To quote the NYT article,

The Socialists have, in this contest, become conservatives, fighting to preserve systems that voters think need to be improved, though not abandoned.

This statement makes some big assumptions on what voters think, but be that as it may. Could it be that socialists have turned from reformers into defenders of the social support systems' status quo because they were gullible enough to allow conservatives to tell them what not to think in the wake of the collapse of the eastern bloc? Not to speak of the unrelenting onslaught of the neo-liberal reform agenda that seems to preclude any extension of these systems since Reagan and Thatcher dominated the west. After conservative outrage at the thought, German Social Democrats (SPD) excluded cooperation with the Left Party (a coalition of western socialists disappointed by their party's right-shift and eastern post-communists). By doing this, the SPD made themselves an impotent appendage of the conservatives. At the same time, they failed to recognize that, 20 years after the fall of the Berlin wall, conservatives give post-communists much less credit for their ability for democratic reform than they gave their own former Nazi members only five years after the war.

The NYT article further quotes Giovanni Sartori as saying

The Socialists can’t adapt to the loss of their basic electorate, and with globalism, the welfare state can no longer exist in the same way

This statement is, however, based on the assumption that society as a whole values profits higher than lifestyle. Seeing as, even in the boom before the bust, only the highest 10% of German incomes saw an increase*, the purported view that socialists are losing their basic electorate is a myth. A bank teller is no less a worker than her manual labour compatriot, even though she might over-ambitiously vote like her bank's CEO. The real question is, through what deception do conservative parties manage to coax a majority to vote against their own interests?

To reclaim their voter base, left-wing parties need to liberate themselves from the denkverbot/crimethink laws set by conservatives and find common ground with partners in other parties everywhere. They need to build their own forward-facing reform agenda adapted to modern conditions, giving the common man chances to profit from the efficiency gains of globalization just as much as the corporation. The discussion among socialists in the coming years will be interesting. It remains to be seen whether the right wing of the SPD will relinquish the power they have easily.

Food for thought, if corporations sell movie dics so cheaply in east asia, why can't you buy them at asian market prices over the internet and play them in your player in the west? (Technical answer: because they have a region code. How is it that region codes are ok?)

* Sources:
Einkommen stagnieren - nur die Reichen werden reicher
Die Mittelschicht schrumpft
Studie: Aufschwung an meisten Haushalten vorbeigegangen