Gary Johnson wrote the article that follows in early 2005, shortly after what may have been the greatest tsunami in recorded history which killed a quarter million people in Asia. For sometime, the article appeared on a website maintained by the noted "think tank" and consulting organization, Workforce Associates.

However, Gary's article doesn't deal specifically with the great tsunami. On the other hand, we believe that it's still very much relevant to current economic and geopolitical concerns. As a consequence, we've decided to make it available again here.

Author and lecturer Gary Johnson spent his youth in commercial broadcasting and entertainment before teaching for a half-dozen colleges and universities in the U.S. and abroad over a third of a century and operating a consulting firm in the Twin Cities for twenty years. He's currently President of NewWorld Trends, a virtual think-tank about the 21st century, and has been Managing Editor of Internet pioneer newwork.com for more than twelve years.

France's greatest 20th century poet, Paul Valery, is credited with remarking that
"the future isn't what it used to be."
He was right, of course; but, you know, the past isn't either.
Gary Johnson

A difference that makes a difference

If you want to hear contradictory opinions about the American economy or its future, you can either hang out at your local tavern, listening to people who have had too much beer but no training or experience whatever in any of the relevant subjects, or you can listen to perfectly sober, highly-experienced people who have Ph.D.'s in ALL of the relevant subjects. Both major candidates in the recent presidential campaign easily could have lined up supportive, highly-credentialled and experienced experts from Philadelphia to Chicago, or nearly.

However, there's a difference between the bumper-sticker, supermarket-tabloid level of intellect that seems to predominate in much of American life now and the kind of higher-level discourse that is still possible. As P. T. Barnum pointed out, if you want to draw a crowd, start a fight, and, from the commercial broadcaster's point of view, the purpose of the program is not to inform or even to entertain, but to draw an audience to the commercials.

Given common Islamic perceptions of the West at the moment, it's a very unfortunate time for the American popular culture to be so vulgar. Radical Muslims even object to many of the things we celebrate on the Fourth of July, so it doesn't help that we might also feel like boiling our shoes after walking across an American movie set or through a broadcast studio now. While surely untrue, this is not a good time for us to remove all doubt from Muslims who have long suspected that the United States has a pornographic culture overall and is polluting the world.

I'm no more an entertainer at this point than former Senator Bill Bradley is a basketball player, although I suspect that both of us value our previous incarnations and the effects these have had on nearly everything we have done since. Even though I'm not much of a consumer of the pop culture now, I overhear quite a lot of political and religious talk that is thin to the point of transparency. Much of it is the uninformed irrational noise that one might expect in some kinds of hospitals or nursing homes. The noisiest of this talk relies heavily on stereotypes, caricatures, extreme selectivity, the use of multiple standards, "straw man" arguments, and most of the fallacies known to intellectual history. By definition, stereotypes and caricatures are distortions of reality, and hagiography and demonization are opposite sides of the same counterfeit coin.

Fortunately, we aren't required to look to either Michael Moore or Mel Gibson's hot 2004 movies for intellectual or moral leadership, or to confine ourselves to the levels of naivete, gullibility, or depravity that this redundant case material reflects in American society. It's probably not too flippant for me to say that I tend to agree with most of the things that many Democrats and Republicans say about each other. We can be thankful that our choices aren't confined to the lunatic left and the lunatic right.

At worst, arguments among so-called "liberals" and so-called "conservatives"--both of which are Rorschach Ink Blot-kinds of concepts--are carried on at a comic book level. At best, these represent alternative perspectives on a reality that is much more complex and rapidly changing than anybody's ideology, and we need all the perspectives we can get.

Fortunately, both major American political parties still contain psychologically normal grownups who are far more sophisticated than their parties' rhetoric, as well as much more intellectually honest and fair than one might expect from talk radio, the cable TV shout shows, or propagandistic films.

Presidents Ford and Carter, who once were bitter campaign opponents, are now genuine best friends. Presidents Clinton and George Bush, Sr. have been recruited by the current President to raise funds for the desperate victims of the recent tsunamis in South Asia, and President Clinton and his Republican opponent in the 1996 presidential campaign, former Senator Bob Dole, together raised $100 million in scholarship money for the children of victims of the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001.

Former Democratic Texas Governor Ann Richards now works closely with Republicans in a New York City consulting firm. When Democrat Madeleine Albright and Republican Henry Kissinger, both foreign-born former Secretaries of State, appear on television together, their mutually respectful discussions are more like post-doctoral seminars than TV shout shows.

How things looked from Beijing

I thought about these things a couple of years ago as our bus spent half an hour or so stuck in traffic in front of the Foreign Ministry Building in Beijing. Even though I had visited British Hong Kong several times during the years that I served on the international faculty of the University of Maryland, this was the first time I had been in Beijing or Shanghai. My wife Roberta had made three previous trips to mainland China, including a visit the year before the Tiananmen Square massacre with a group of Western journalists and journalism educators who were official guests of the Chinese government. We've wondered over the years since if any of those greatly outspoken students she talked to then have been alive since 1989.

I thought about how we Americans, despite common assumptions, do not take our First Amendment with us when we travel to other countries, and how virtually none of the people I saw passing on Beijing streets had ever seen an election. An American passport is worth more than its weight in diamonds in most parts of the world, but still, I silently and irrationally wondered to myself if anyone in that building knew who I was and that I was there. Years earlier, newwork.com was one of the Internet sites that the Chinese government had attempted to block for a while, but, by the time I arrived, they had given up, and it was freely accessible, even though the government continued to shut down "Internet Cafes" in the major cities, particularly near university campuses.

I also thought about some of the plans that had been hatched in that building during recent decades, and how polarized Americans were greatly exaggerating the differences among themselves now. Compared to many of the folks who very likely are still working in Beijing's government buildings, our most rabid political partisans should be running toward each other yelling, "Brother! Sister!"

The future still isn't what it used to be

So, my concerns about the future of life and work in the United States go considerably beyond issues relating to the "outsourcing" of high-value jobs to foreign regions, even though I think it's fair to say that our decision to publish Dr. William Raynor's three articles on the topic on newwork.com, beginning three years ago or so, probably "lit the match" that resulted in the explosion of media and political interest in these topics.

True, the number of high-skill American jobs that have been sent to India and China is a small proportion of total American jobs, and international outsourcing accounted for a tiny percentage of the jobs lost in the United States after 2000. Still, it's probably important for economists and the rest of us to try to think about more than one thing at a time.

For decades, I've used a metaphor of economic, societal, and cultural change that distinguishes among "ripples," "waves," "tides," and the "rearrangement of tectonic plates." I'm interested in tides and tectonic plates. I like context and perspective. I like big pictures, because I think it is large-scale change that will most determine the remainder of our lives and those of successive generations.

Ninety-five percent of the 21st century still lies ahead, but some of the persons who will see the 22nd century have already been born, and some may be your children or grandchildren. The Chinese are right: a century really isn't very long, and they quite clearly intend to be the dominant people on earth before the present century ends. To what extent will the world of the late 21st century resemble the world we see all around us during its first years? What sort of America will our grandchildren live in when they are old and have grandchildren of their own? Will America still be the world's innovator and principal economic engine? Will democracy survive on the earth?

Not many Americans would have predicted only a few years ago that the two most heavily populated nations in the world--which together make up approximately 36 percent of the entire world's people--would also have the world's fastest-growing economies by 2005.

A growing number of the world's best-educated and wealthiest persons now live in India and China. True, both countries also contain enormous numbers of the world's poorest people as well. For hundreds of millions of people in these countries, the equivalent of a US dollar is two days' pay, when they can get it. Still, there is an educated, affluent consumer class in India that is larger than the combined total populations of Germany and France. Moreover, Bangalore is the "Silicon Valley" of India and one of the reasons why the high tech corridor between San Francisco and San Jose may never again support the number of highly skilled workers who could be found there before the "dot-com-all-ye-faithful" bust of a few years ago.

For the moment, China is the most highly populated country in the world with slightly more than 20 percent of the world's people. However, demographers are forecasting that India's population will surpass that of China sometime during the middle of this century. Clearly, many leaders in both countries regard China and India as the world's principal competitors for innovation as well as economic and political dominance as they look into the future. Those of us who believe that the great American Constitution, which required tens of thousands of years of human experience before it could be written, has been of critical importance for all of humanity can take some comfort in the fact that India is a democracy at this point, rather than an autocratic state like China.

Tsunami from the East?

The other day, the Chinese government officially declared that China's population has reached 1.3 billion. It appears that about 300 million of these people have been participating in or benefitting from the great economic boom of recent years. That leaves a billion people, many of whom are worse off now than they were before the Chinese government opened up its economy. However, it's worth noting that the TOTAL U.S. population is now about 294 million, or about 4.5 percent of the world's total.

China's impoverished multitudes aren't going to go away, and their government is fully aware that their great experiment could still unravel and that the country could simply explode into social chaos. Many American "conservatives" claim that freedom is indivisible; that increased economic freedom will bring about greater political freedom, even in China. So far, this doesn't appear to have happened, and at this point, I don't think anybody really knows. During a period of breathtaking global change, there is no compelling reason to believe that traditional or familiar thinking will be greatly relevant to the profound novelty that we see all around us.

For one thing, our ideas have grown out of our experiences in an earlier and much different world and are based on many interpretations of the past that we now know to be mistaken. As the knowledge explosion continues, it even becomes necessary to reinterpret history and pre-history, which is to say that, in effect, all successive generations will have a different past than all human generations so far.

Radical Islam's quarrel with modernism, the West, and the United States is real, and, as as New York Times columnist Tom Friedman has said, some things may be true even if George W. Bush believes them. Microsoft Corporation's former R&D head, whose Ph.D. is in the natural sciences, was on Charlie Rose's TV show recently. Charlie asked him about weapons of mass destruction, particularly biological, and was told that this is one of those topics on which the more you learn about it, the more depressed you're likely to get. The biological contents of a small briefcase, quite literally, could kill a billion people, he said.

Threats from non-state organizations during a high tech era are real, but, if we spend all of our time worrying about terrorism, we may miss something very important. Each day's news brings additional stories about China's growing impact on the world.

With the expiration of quotas the first of this year, given China's nearly inexhaustible supply of very inexpensive low-skill labor, it is likely that it will become the world's apparel factory, to the detriment of smaller poor nations in Asia - such as Cambodia, whose garment industry has been resurrecting its economy during recent years. Of course, while this change may impact the global economy, and particularly many poor nations, it isn't likely to influence American workers in great numbers, because most low-skill, low-pay jobs that can be exported have already left the United States. Nonetheless, recent reports indicate that a few remaining apparel manufacturers in the U.S. are closing down operations and laying off workers because of the change in the rules as of January 1, 2005.

China's surging economy has a voracious appetite for energy and raw materials. The recent spike in crude oil prices was the result of events in other parts of the world, but the fact that oil seems to have settled in at an overall price level considerably higher than what we were used to only a few years ago seems to be a result of increasing competition from China, and, to a growing extent, India. In fact, there have been reports during recent days that both China and India are interested in purchasing energy assets in the United States and Russia.

I don't think I expected to see multitudes of Chinese in Mao suits riding bicycles in Beijing and Shanghai, but I wasn't quite prepared for the tremendous number of automobiles and the latest superhighways. In fact, China has suddenly become one of the largest automotive markets in the world.

Many other countries already are far ahead of the U.S. in terms of market penetration of high-speed, broadband Internet access, and China is gaining fast. It will soon have more people on the Internet than any other country, and it will soon be the world's largest market for personal computers. Why are so many American high schools and colleges still emphasizing the teaching of French, for heaven's sake? French! Why not Arabic and Mandarin?

It is said that China now employs about 40 percent of the large construction cranes presently in use in the world, and I have no reason to doubt this. Shanghai's skyline looks like something from a science fiction movie, and we were told that about 3,000 skyscrapers had been built in Shanghai during the nine years or so preceding our visit a couple of years ago. I had no reason to doubt that either.

It's time to get better than you ever thought you could be

What kinds of workers will be in high demand in the new global economy? Surely, Dr. Jane Lommel is correct when she emphasizes the need for higher education and continually upgraded, razor-sharp skills. The people who will lead in the new economy will be people whose abilities differ about as much from those of the masses of humanity, including the current masses of Americans, as the skills of a big-time flying trapeze artist.

If you saw the recent two-segment piece about Google on CBS-TV's "60 Minutes," you may have a sense of the kinds of workers that leading companies are going to need from now on. Or, take a look at the "extra features" DVD that accompanies the Spider-Man 2 movie and see what kinds of expertise it takes to produce a film like that. Concert pianists and symphony conductors have always had to be world-class simply in order to find work, but their experience is similar to that of a growing number of people across many fields. These will be your competitors.

However, where will most of those very high-level jobs be located as we enter the second half of the 21st century? Americans have gotten used to being the world's innovators, but will this continue? Will China and India simply swamp North America and Western Europe? Those who believe that Americans are somehow the world's smartest, best-educated, most creative, most highly motivated, and hardest working people are deceiving no one but themselves.

According to the old joke, there is a sense in which the Cold War was a competition between "our" German physicists and "their" German physicists. Will the future be mostly a competition between America's Harvard, MIT, Stanford, or Cal Tech Ph.D.s and China's Harvard, MIT, Stanford, or Cal Tech Ph.D.s? Maybe not. Suddenly, and for the first time in memory, according to news reports from the past week or two, American universities have begun to have difficulty attracting the world's top students, because there is growing international competition. In fact, China is making an all-out effort to turn 100 (sic) of its universities into world-class research institutions.

Making the world safe for China and India

If I were a Chinese leader at this point, I might be rubbing my hands with glee as societies which, at least in part, have arisen out of the ancient religious cultures of the Middle East appear to be intent upon distracting and, in some cases, destroying one another.

One of the things that Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush appear to have in common is that both, in their respective ways, are religious "fundamentalists." Both seem to believe that they know who the "evil ones" are, and that everything will be just dandy so long as they can kill enough of them. Of course, for Americans, there are great differences between the two men as well. I'm absolutely convinced that Osama bin Laden would like to kill me and also you. I'm equally convinced that, whatever the wisdom of his policies, President Bush is committed to doing all he can to protect us. This is a very big difference.

Nonetheless, both leaders appear to represent a similar regressive mindset that has gained momentum throughout much of the world during recent years, including Islamic regions and within the United States. Despite their deadly opposition to one another, the similarities in the ways that some people in the Islamic world and in the U.S. are interpreting their experiences as they are affected by some of the same trends is simply remarkable, but not altogether puzzling.

We know that change is a major stressor, and changes occurring in the world now not only are profound and fundamental, but also greatly inconsistent. Some things in the world are about the same now as they have been for many centuries; others will be different within weeks. Cultures and creeds that had been separated by thousands of miles or thousands of years now come into daily collision. It is a cliché to say that the world has become a village, but it's nonetheless true that, for many purposes, geography has become irrelevant. In effect, we have seen a collapse of both space and time in recent years, and the world is reeling from the impact.

It is a time when large numbers of people desperately hunger for simplicity and certainty, and one surely can find both if one turns to one's remote ancestors for leadership. Ancient ideas surely were simpler and our ancestors were very certain about them, but most of those ideas also have turned out to be wrong.

If you believe that the more people who believe something, the more likely it is to be true, consider that for fifteen hundred years, virtually everybody believed what Claudius Ptolemy and Aristotle taught 2,000 years ago and more, and what people for centuries believed that ancient religious documents supported: that the Sun revolves around the Earth. We now know that this could not possibly be more incorrect.

Most of our traditional ideologies and most familiar institutions have their roots in a time when even the smartest people on earth didn't know that the blood circulates or what the heart is for. That was the level of understanding. Our remote ancestors were just as smart as we, but they had zero access to any of the information from the knowledge explosion of the past half-dozen centuries, to say nothing of the past several decades. This is a very bad time for us to regress to the limited condition of our ancient ancestors in a futile effort to cope with our own stresses. What we know depends entirely on how we know it. Why do modern researchers go to all that trouble and spend all that time on their projects? Because that's what it takes.

Despite Mel Gibson's assertion at the "People's Choice Awards" celebration that his 2004 film and Michael Moore's "have nothing to do with one another," the filmmakers have a very great deal in common. Both work in the tradition of Leni Riefenstahl, another enormously talented but fairly na•ve and perhaps intellectually dishonest filmmaker.

Neither Gibson nor Moore has betrayed the slightest elementary understanding of what it takes to build accurate portrayals of reality. For one thing, you don't start with conclusions and then bend images around to support your preconceptions. Instead, you must start with honest questions; i.e., you must start as if you really don't know what the answers are, because unless or until you do what it takes to know, you really don't know.

There are a limited number of options for reaching factual conclusions or providing trustworthy answers to empirical questions of any kind, whether these deal with nature, including human nature, the past, or current events: We can simply make up something, accept something that other people have made up, or we can rely on the "best available version of the truth" at any particular time that results from competently-conducted research.

With China and India looming on the horizon, this is not a good time for us to repeal the Renaissance while trying to destroy one another in the process.

I'm most interested in the long view, which really isn't very long, of course; but what can you do now to increase your chances of success in the revolutionary new world economy? For one thing, read Jane Lommel's NetWorking column regularly, and, if you haven't read the previous editions, read them now.

For another, read Rich Feller's latest book, co-authored with Judy Whichard: Knowledge Nomads and the Nervously Employed: Workplace Change & Courageous Career Choices. Dr. Feller is one of the nation's leading career development experts, as well as an internationally recognized consultant and speaker. He and Dr. Whichard serve on the faculty of Colorado State University.

Theirs is not the kind of book that busy students, professionals, or "road warriors" will not start because they know they can never finish. It is brief--only about 150 pages--so it will easily slip into a carry-on for those of you who find time to read only in airports and on planes. Highly recommended.

Gary G. Johnson
January 2005