America a Technological Superpower?:A Lie We Are Paying For Now
What does it mean to be technologically superior as a country? Does it mean a country makes the most discoveries?Has the most machines or factories? Does it mean its citizen’s use the most technology in their everyday lives? Most Americans and the world have assumed that the last remaining superpower, the United States of America, was technologically superior to the rest of the countries in the world.
The decades long decline of the American car industry would seem to directly contradict that we are a technological superior country. Have we ever been the most technologically superior country? During World War II, almost every weapon we made before and during most of the war was technologically inferior to those of Germany, Japan, and even Russia. It was only our large manufacturing capability that really allowed us to overwhelm our enemies rather than our technological prowess.
Anyone who has traveled the world over the past 30 years can tell you that many less developed countries were quicker than the United States to develop cellular telephones and satellite television reception. In fact, the less sophisticated cable television networks in the world are actually in the United States.
Precision machining and manufacturing by highly skilled technicians in the electronics industry, for example, flourishes in Asia because they have prolonged training programs to make skilled economically competitive workers for such industries. In the United States, manufacturing has moved as much as possible to automation rather than highly skilled technical workers because we do not produce them like other countries.
Very few countries in the world guarantee a minimum wage to unskilled workers like the United States. When you combine that guarantee with a national high school drop out rate approaching 40% it means we produce a highly paid but unskilled workforce that cannot compete with highly trained machinists and electronics technicians. Our industries thus become based upon automation and unskilled labor jobs.
As the rest of the world sees its standard of living and education improve this discrepancy of the United States with the rest of world will only become worse. Within our life times, the middle class in India and China may well become larger and more affluent per capita then the middle class of the United States.
The crisis of the American automobile industry is just the latest that has seen electronics, textiles, and other products produced more abroad than at home. We are a society of the extremes, college graduates and high school dropouts, but without a real economic means to produce a real middle class. Those who dream that there can be a middle class of unskilled workers consisting of a high school education or less have to accept the reality that this is creating a caste in our society below that of Europe and Asia.
American automobile manufacturers convinced that American public that American made larger cars were safer because they had superior safety technology than foreign made imports. This is only reason that they have been able to keep any market share at all even though subsequent developments in safety by foreign imports showed that them to be equal to or superior to American cars.
We must create a society where the average worker economically produces equal or greater then competing workers in other countries. Rather then making them work longer hours for less pay with less education, we need to find ways to establish a workforce with better education, better skills, and more technology that makes them more productive.
We need radical changes in our education system to adequately prepare the vast majority of the population to be able to obtain economically viable employment. The sense of entitlement felt by many of the American population and current disregard for hard work espoused by those who view American life as being in a lottery is inconsistent with our future survival as a major economic power.
Those in America’s executive board rooms have this same problem with false sense of entitlement as well. The corporate culture in the United States is all about individual wealth and power and not about establishing an organization for the public good. Look at the difference in the way the Japanese see Toyota or the Germans see Daimler-Benz.
Many are saying we need another New Deal with government funded infrastructure jobs to pull us out of this economic crisis. What they fail to see is that the skills of our average uneducated worker have really not changed much from the 1930s so that is still the only type of jobs that many can still do. It is time for America to admit that it is not a technologically advanced country and to correct our inadequacies in education and the corporate culture. Protectionism against an ever advancing globalization of economic efficiency will not serve America in the long run.
Tony Magaña grew up in McAllen Texas, attended Texas A&M University, served as an officer in Army Reserve, and holds a doctorate from Harvard University. The co-founder of Contempo Magazine has participated in Valley business for over 20 years.He is a member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.
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