Deconstructing Charlie

I've been watching Charlie Rose again after a long time not. Quick impression: he's become a better interviewer, but he's choosing to interview more boring people.

He interviewed the head of General Electric the other night. Might have been General Electric himself. He's a wily coyote, that guy. He said some smart things about the global corporate landscape, like that India and China are succeeding because they use their markets to define their businesses, and we should do the same. He even mentioned alternative energies and advanced health care, which Americans can create and build, and Americans want to buy. We'd probably disagree on what those mean, though. There's a market on this continent crying out for solar, wind and other renewable sustainable energy systems that work for people. And my idea of advanced health care isn't just hot new CAT scanners from GE, but universal single-payer health care.

He said something else that's true as far as it goes, which is not far enough. Excusing his company's jumping into outsourcing, he said it wasn't because of cheap labor but because of skills and capabilities---in the U.S., 4% of college degrees are in engineering, while it's 30% in India. If you have engineers, he said, you get manufacturing.

Well, maybe in a very narrow sense in recent history that was true, as engineering and other jobs went to India and elsewhere, thanks to failing education systems bled dry by rich people who wanted to spend Their Money on every idiotic indulgence except public schools.

But it's also more generally true that if there was manufacturing here, there would be reason for people to study engineering, because they would have jobs when they finished. The rise of science and technology was tied totally to manufacturing for the past two hundred years. It was the needs of manufacturers and industrial businesses (steel, railroads, coal and oil, etc.) that drove science. The only other comparable factor was warfare. And maybe medicine, a little.

So if G.E. wants engineers in America, give them a place to work in America. And maybe talk a little about the responsibility to pay taxes to support the common good as well as the responsibility of making money.