Innovation and Jobs

One of the core themes in this last week's State of the Union address was the call to innovate and create our way out of the sinkhole into which City-On-A-Hill-America is slowly sliding.  The idea, I think, is pretty classically American.  We grow by seeking the new frontier, chasing our Manifest Destiny right up until we prang into the Pacific.  We improve our lives through new products and pharmaceuticals that suddenly make everything better. 

But I just don't buy it.  Not any more.  Innovation is no longer the engine by which American jobs are created.

Nifty new electronic gizmos and doodads to clutter our rec room?  Sure.  Remedies for ailments we never knew we had?  Absosmurfly.  But jobs?  No.  I don't see it, not in the context of our globalized capitalistic economy.

Let me offer up three examples from innovative, successful American firms.  If you had to think about what American company would be consistently described as cutting edge, profitable, and successful, Apple would be at or near the top of every list.  While not without flaws, the company has created products that are aesthetically pleasing, boundary shifting, and that people want to buy.  My own home has a rather large number of iPods and iPhones and iPads, and I'm composing this on an iMac.

Apple is an innovator.  But jobs?  Yeah, his name may be Jobs, but they mostly ain't American.  Apple maintains a stable of about 25,000 American employees, in design, engineering, retail, and corporate.  But when it comes to actually making the iPods and iPhones and iPads and iMacs, that gets done by  Chinese subsidiary Foxconn, which employs 250,000 workers to make products for Apple.  A generation ago, those would have been a quarter-million American wage-earners, enough to fully fuel the economy of a mid-sized city.  Now?  Nope.

Globalized industry is a game changer.

That painfully neglected reality was reinforced recently by an announcement from Evergreen Solar.  That company, in the event you haven't heard of it, is the third largest manufacturer of solar panels in the United States.  Or rather, it was.  After many millions of dollars of public funds and tax breaks were given to it's leadership to develop renewable energy production, the suits did what suits are obligated to do.  They chose to remain competitive in a global economy.  Evergreen Solar is folding up shop in the U.S., and will now produce solar panels only in it's new Chinese factory.

In a globalized economy, where production chases the region with the lowest possible wages, innovation does not mean jobs.  Not here, anyway.

But innovation poses another threat.  It takes jobs away, particularly as more efficiencies are discovered in production.  Take, for instance, Amazon, another successful innovator.  I buy stuff from Amazon plenty, and the success of their Kindle ebook platform has surprised me...I still like paper for my bookish moments...but I'm apparently now in the minority.  Amazon recently announced that sales of books on the Kindle now exceeded their sales of paperback books.  That's good for the trees, but it's an ill wind if you work in retail.  Virtualized products, be they books or videos or games, well, they don't require bricks and mortar or paper.  If the people who read are increasingly content to read electronically (as you are, dear reader), then there's no need for book stores.  The scores of I.T. jobs that are required to maintain that business model don't counterbalance the tens of thousands of jobs that will be lost as Borders and Barnes and Nobles start to fold.

I wish I could share Obama's optimism about innovation and jobs.  But I think that industrial-era horse has left the stable.

Buicks Are Part of Chairman Christ's New Five Year Plan

This morning over coffee, I was reading a review of a new book entitled God is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith is Changing the World. The review was written by a good sort, the estimable Diana Butler Bass, and it articulated what she saw as the core theme of the book: the mesh between religious liberty and progress.

It's a valid connection, and a hopeful theme in human society, but one particular quote jumped out at me as a wee bit off. Maybe I'm just oversensitive, so let me share the quote in question:

The book opens with an American evangelical-style Bible study in Shanghai, where the pastor proclaims: "In Europe the church is old. Here it is modern. Religion is a sign of higher ideals and progress. Spiritual wealth and material wealth go together. That is why we will win." These words echo the American view that economic prosperity meshes with religious freedom. This vignette supports the book's main point: that religion and modernity are not at odds, that, in the American mode, they can function together to create prosperity and individual freedom.

While I may be projecting a bit, I don't think what the Chinese evangelist is saying and what the book is arguing are the same thing. When an evangelical says: "Spiritual wealth and material wealth go together," they generally don't mean "religious liberty and material wealth go together." In fact, they pretty much never mean that.

They mean that being spiritual gets you material blessings. Period. You should be spiritual, because the 2010 Buick Lacrosse is a really fine looking car and Jesus can get it for you if you ask real nice. And given the choice between a brand new Buick and religious freedom for Muslims, I'm not quite sure how many Chinese evangelicals would choose door number two.

I agree that religious liberty is absolutely necessary, and a sign of a culture in which progress is possible. But religious liberty and evangelical Christianity worldwide have a somewhat interesting relationship. On the one hand, Christians value the freedom to worship and to share the Gospel. But when you believe that every other faith is a one way ticket to eternal damnation, your motivation level to support the rights of other faiths has to be somewhat impacted.

As the global marketplace becomes a stronger force, the danger for the integrity of Christianity is that it will become increasingly co-opted into the values and norms of the marketplace. The Gospel of Prosperity and the Word Faith movement are powerful, powerful forces in the developing world. The spread of a consumerist "Christianity" in which individual material prosperity is the goal is a real, and I would argue spiritually dangerous, eventuality.

Let Them Eat Mud

As one of the four people who still read print media, I was going through the WaPo yesterday, and stumbled across an article on Haiti.

Haiti is and has seemingly always been a total mess. As a kid, my church maintained a partnership with Haiti, sending relief supplies and other support. A good friend recently came back from a medical mission there, and the delightful pictures of suppurating wounds and skin ailments he put up confirmed that things are pretty intensely unpleasant there still. It's a little slice of intractably abject poverty, right there in our own backyard.

What particularly struck me in the article were two things. First, that Haitians have been so impacted by the recent economic downturn that they can no longer afford "mud cookies." Those are a delightful baked confection in which the most significant ingredient is clay. People increasingly can't even buy baked dirt in Haiti.

The second item was a little snippet of "hope" being offered up by our Secretary of State as she toured a garment factory in Port au Prince, the capital.

She marveled at the factory, and hailed it as a model for progress in Haiti. Workers there were making between two and three times the average Haitian's daily salary...which means they were making between $4 and $6 a day. Marvelous! Wonderful! They're being given the opportunity to pull themselves out of poverty!

So here we have jobs that used to pay American garment industry workers $6 an hour...and Haitian workers are being paid almost a factor of 10 less to do the same work. Unless you own the factories, how is this a triumph? Six bucks a day isn't going to turn things around. Sure, you can have all the mud cookies you can eat. Haitians can continue to struggle, and be only very slightly better fed, until they get sick and can't do it any more.

What I marvel at as I look at this sort of thing is how perfectly it mirrors the worst elements of late 19th and early 20th century capitalism. Back then, it was Americans who labored for negligible pay and for backbreaking hours. They mostly came from rural backgrounds, and were lured to urban industrial centers with the promise of consistent work. Within most democratic nations, though, the fact that folks could vote and freely organize and associate (more or less) ultimately counterbalanced the worst practices of profit-driven enterprise.

But I struggle to see how this works with globalized capitalism. If those who...ahem...control the means of production are able to circumvent democratic counterbalances, I'm just not sure how the intense imbalances in wealth that the market generates are ever going to be resolved. All one has to do is move industry to places where government is either weak or does not represent it's people.

For some reason, this sort of thing always makes me think of the prophet Amos:

This is what the LORD says:
"For three sins of Israel,
even for four, I will not turn back {my wrath}.
They sell the righteous for silver,
and the needy for a pair of sandals.

They trample on the heads of the poor
as upon the dust of the ground
and deny justice to the oppressed.
Father and son use the same girl
and so profane my holy name.

They lie down beside every altar
on garments taken in pledge.
In the house of their god
they drink wine taken as fines.