In "The World is Flat" Freidman talks about the ambition gap. The idea that American kids just don't want it as baddly. That companies outsource their work and cut costs by more than half and get more productivity out of their workers than they did from American hires. First off my personal experience with the end result of Indian outsourcing, both in the form of getting Rajib on the phone and in getting piss poor excuse for tech support from a two week trainee HS dropout, has given damn little evidence of this so called productivity increase. They might field twice as many phone calls but two times zero is still nothing the last time I checked. But hey thats anecdotal evidence and hardly a large sample. Anyway back to this so called ambition gap. Frankly he is comparing apples and oranges. He goes to great lengths to show how something like call support is a bottom of the barrel job here and one which atracts the best of the best in India. The pay is comisurate with that fact in India... and in the US. Comparing the ambition of someone working a shit job to one who feels lucky to have it is asinine. Pay american tech support folks the same in the US economy that ~$4000 gets in the Indian economy and I bet your so called ambition gap gets quite a bit smaller.
Furthermore he talks about the ambition of Chinese workers in terms of hours spent in the lab. Of Indian's willingness to dampen their accents. Rather than atributing these things to workers in a desperate situation doing what they have to do to make it he atributes it to imbedded cultural factors. I take it he doesn't have a grandfather who talks about walking 18 miles barefoot uphil (both ways) through the snow to school... or working 20 years without a week of vacation or whatever other example he could care to come up with from an Indian or Chineese worker in the form of incredible drive to succeed. The thing is americans have worked that hard. And where it benefits them they still work that hard today. But we also worked damn hard to make it so that folks didn't have to kill themselves just to have a chance. They didn't have to spend all their time working at the expense of their family just to get ahead.
Do kids these days take to much for granted. YES. Does that mean they should have to go back to walking "18 miles through the snow" ? Hell no. Theres a baby in that thar bath water so don't be so quick to throw it out. Again. Put american kids on equal footing with Indian/Chineese workers and I have little doubt they will be up for the challenge. But as I mentioned in my last post that will never happen with current exchange rates.
Friendman talks about the education gap and how fewer and fewer American students are studying engineering. And how these emerging nations are minting them left and right. He seems to think it odd that American kids see the reality of competing with forign engineers that make less than minimum wage (in terms of what it costs the company) as something to avoid. Its a no win game. The idea of so called 'value' added engineering being the sole domain of Yankee ingenuity is absurd. Our historical predilection for smart folks comming up with smart ideas has everything to do with the fact that folks who did so were well rewarded. The idea that you can avoid the problem of outsourcing by just going to value added engineering (being creative etc..) makes about as much sense as when the moron in a movie tries to get away from an onrushing vehicle by running down the road in front of it.
The other problem with his notion of simply moving to value added engineering is it is patentently absurd to think that can be the solution for the masses. You get to value added (or Creative control) positions by spending your time in the trenches. You move up to personal service and expertise in tech support by spending time in the trenches. Well in this new economy the trenches are rapidly dissapearing for Americans. There is a ladder to climb but the bottom rungs are missing and you don't get to just start at the top. Friedmans assertions that American kids expect to start at the top aside... they are very inteligent at realising where opportunities lay and where they do not. You can't get to the top if you can't get your foot in the door. Just how exactly is an american engineering student supposed to cut their teeth these days? Yes more advanced and creative engineering jobs are opening up every day in America... but they are jobs that require experience. And the jobs that are dissapearing the fastest are those where folks GAIN that experience.
In the end I think Friedman made a mistake saying the world is flat. True enough cheap communications means India can provide Wall Streets back room. But the problem is I can't build a better distributed backroom in the US no matter what I do. Labor costs to much due to the exchange rate. Chinese manufacturing is an even more obvious example. The fact that you CAN'T feasibly build a factory in California to compete with the low cost of Chinese manufacturing despite the fact it is 5000 miles closer shows that the world is ANYTHING but flat. The playing field ANYTHING but level. The door has been opened one way for India and China. The world will be flat when The US can be India's backroom, Or India the US backroom... and the choice is determined by who does it better.
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