Friedman: India vs. China vs. Egypt | NYTimes.com

Another interesting column by Tom Friedman.  Here is the premise:

"It’s hard to escape a visit to India without someone asking you to compare it to China. This visit was no exception, but I think it’s more revealing to widen the aperture and compare India, China and Egypt. India has a weak central government but a really strong civil society, bubbling with elections and associations at every level. China has a muscular central government but a weak civil society, yet one that is clearly straining to express itself more. Egypt, alas, has a weak government and a very weak civil society, one that was suppressed for 50 years, denied real elections and, therefore, is easy prey to have its revolution diverted by the one group that could organize, the Muslim Brotherhood, in the one free space, the mosque. But there is one thing all three have in common: gigantic youth bulges under the age of 30, increasingly connected by technology but very unevenly educated."

Read the rest of Friedman's column. It is worth reading and thinking about because the impact over the next 10, 20, and 30 years will be bigger than people realize.

Conservatives that believe in climate change!

Tom Friedman found conservatives that believe climate change is real! Unfortunately, they live in Australia and New Zealand. Friedman makes some great points comparing Australian and Kiwi conservatives with their American counterparts:

"Indeed, to go from America — amid the G.O.P. primaries — to Down Under is to experience both jet lag and a political shock. In New Zealand and Australia, you could almost fit their entire political spectrum — from conservatives to liberals — inside the U.S. Democratic Party.

Or as Paul Quinn, a parliamentarian from New Zealand’s conservative National Party, once told a group of visiting American Fulbright scholars: “I will explain to you how our system works compared to yours: You have Democrats and Republicans. My Labor opponents would be Democrats. I am a member of the National Party, and we would be ... Democrats” as well.

For instance, there is much debate here over climate policy — Australia has a carbon tax, New Zealand has cap and trade — but there is no serious debate about climate science. Whereas in today’s G.O.P. it is political suicide to take climate change seriously, in Australia and New Zealand it is political suicide for conservatives not to."

He also touches briefly on mandatory voting in Australia and New Zealand and how it forces politicians to pander to the center rather than the extremes. It is a big reason both parties in both countries down under support climate change legislation and single-payer health care systems. Mandatory voting is a great idea that, unfortunately, will never fly in the United States.

The paradigm shift in American labor

Every time I read Tom Friedman's columns in The New York Times, I'm amazed by how insightful and pragmatic he is. Today's column is no exception, with this very prescient point about why "Average Is Over":

"There will always be change — new jobs, new products, new services. But the one thing we know for sure is that with each advance in globalization and the I.T. revolution, the best jobs will require workers to have more and better education to make themselves above average."

Read the whole column, especially the part about "E La Carte" and the Chinese factory that makes iPhone screens. As with most of Friedman's writing, you'll be fascinated and frightened at the same time.

Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, and that's pretty much it.

If you read Afghanistan's history, the only men to conquer this essentially landless region were Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan. Everyone else pretty much failed miserably. Tom Friedman references that with yet another excellent column in today's New York Times:

"Last week, I toured the great Mogul compound of Fatehpur Sikri, near the Taj Mahal. My Indian guide mentioned in passing that in the late 1500s, when Afghanistan was part of India and the Mogul Empire, the Iranian Persians invaded Afghanistan in an effort to “seize the towns of Herat and Kandahar” and a great battle ensued. I had to laugh to myself: “Well, add them to that long list of suckers — countries certain that controlling Afghanistan’s destiny was vital to their national security.”"

The rest of Friedman's column is worth reading as well.

Right again Mr. Friedman!

Tom Friedman, as always, nails it right on the head:

"President Obama has chosen not to push for a price signal for political reasons. He has opted for using regulations and government funding. In the area of regulation, he deserves great credit for just pushing through new fuel economy standards that will ensure that by 2025 the average U.S. car will get the mileage (and have the emissions) of today’s Prius hybrid. But elsewhere, Obama has relied on green subsidies rather than a price signal. Some of this has really helped start-ups leverage private capital, but you also get Solyndras. The G.O.P. has blocked any price signal and fought every regulation. The result too often is taxpayer money subsidizing wonderful green innovation, but with no sustainable market within which these companies can scale.

Let’s fix that. We need revenue to balance the budget. We need sustainable clean-tech jobs. We need less dependence on Mideast oil. And we need to take steps to mitigate climate change — just in case Governor Perry is wrong. The easiest way to do all of this at once is with a gasoline tax or price on carbon. Would you rather cut Social Security and Medicare or pay a little more per gallon of gas and make the country stronger, safer and healthier? It still amazes me that our politicians have the courage to send our citizens to war but not to ask the public that question."

His new book is out too. It's been an interesting read thus far, although I'm only about 10% of the way in right now.

Friedman: The Bin Laden Decade - NYTimes.com

Thomas L. Friedman, right on point today in The New York Times:

"Washington basically gave the Arab dictators a free pass to tighten their vise grip on their people — as long as these Arab leaders arrested, interrogated and held the Islamic militants in their societies and eliminated them as a threat to us.

It wasn’t meant as a free pass, and we really did have a security problem with jihadists, and we really didn’t mean to give up on our freedom agenda — but Arab leaders, like Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, sensed where our priorities were. That is why Mubarak actually arrested the one Egyptian who dared to run against him for president in his last election, and he and the other Arab autocrats moved to install their sons as successors."

Furthermore...

"President George W. Bush used the post-9/11 economic dip to push through a second tax cut we could not afford. He followed that with a Medicare prescription drug entitlement we cannot afford and started two wars in the wake of 9/11 without raising taxes to pay for them — all at a time when we should have been saving money in anticipation of the baby boomers’ imminent retirement. As such, our nation’s fiscal hole is deeper than ever and Republicans and Democrats — rather than coming together and generating the political authority needed for us to take our castor oil to compensate for our binge — are just demonizing one another."

What if we were the bottom of the (brain) drain?

Great article in Slate Magazine about how flawed our immigration policy is against the most qualified applicants:

"The country does not cap the number of "family-based" green cards, available to relatives of U.S. residents. But it does cap the number of "employment-based" green cards—the ones often needed by entrepreneurial super-immigrants—at 140,000 per year."

I've seen this flaw many times over as I've seen numerous immigrant families in which the one successful sibling emigrated to the United States and subsequently sponsored the not-so-successful/educated siblings to come over without any issues getting them here but plenty of adjustment issues once they got here.

The Slate article gets to the heart of what New York Times columnist Tom Friedman always asks about why foreign students upon receiving a Ph.D. from an American university aren't given a green card along with their degree. Personally I wouldn't mind seeing something similar to the Canadian system, which has a separate and distinct category for working professionals wanting to emigrate to Canada.

He Don't Know What He Don't Know

The New York Times' Tom Friedman writes an uncharacteristically humerous column today about what a WikiLeaks document from the Chinese Embassy in Washington would look like. After taking a very accurate cheap shot at Amtrak's Acela:

"The ambassador recently took what the Americans call a fast train — the Acela — from Washington to New York City. Our bullet train from Beijing to Tianjin would have made the trip in 90 minutes. His took three hours — and it was on time!"

Friedman goes on the state the obvious fact very few politicians are willing to say:

"But the Americans are oblivious. They travel abroad so rarely that they don’t see how far they are falling behind."

Unfortunately this has always been the case in this country. For example, we also complain about how high our taxes are in the United States even though our tax rates are among the lowest in the world. It's not surprising then that the places with the highest concentrations of immigrant populations as well as people that vacation abroad tend to be blue states. People living in those states actually have a clue as to how the rest of the world lives.

Does it really take 30 years to make a modest improvement?

"...the Next-Gen High Speed Rail line would reduce the travel time between Washington, D.C., and New York City from 162 minutes to 96 minutes. The travel time between New York and Boston would go from 215 minutes to 84 minutes."

So if you do the math, Washington, D.C. to Boston currently takes 6 hours and 17 minutes, not counting delays due to MARC, SEPTA, NJ Transit, Metro-North, and the MBTA Commuter Rail clogging up the tracks. The vision is to reduce this travel time to 3 hours to cover the same 440 miles by the year 2040. So instead of covering a maximum 70 miles per hour, we'll have trains that can go a maximum of 147 miles per hour 30 years from now. A nice improvement but, the Chinese already have a line in existence today that covers the 75 miles from Beijing to Tianjin in 25 minutes (or, 180 miles per hour. TODAY!)

So, in other words, is our vision to become today's China in the next 30 years? Not really, but why should it take us 30 years to do what's best for commuters (faster trips), the environment (fewer cars on the road), and national security (reduced usage of petrodictator's oil and you can't fly a train into a building unless there are tracks that lead to one)?

"...China and India were the biggest economies in the world for almost all of the past 2000 years."

Go to the post on economist.com to see the graph. It shows that over the past 2,000 years, China and India were the dominant economies for the first 1,700 of those years. Thomas L. Friedman once said that the emergence of China and India is not a new world order but rather the restoration of the old world order. This graph proves that to be true.

Tom Friedman's column in today's New York Times

Thomas L. Friedman pens yet another great column in today's New York Times showing his expertise on South Asian affairs. Check it out if you can.

Immigration Bailout?

Thomas L. Friedman has a great column in today's New York Times about how restricting immigration could impact the economic recovery. Fareed Zakaria also has a recent column in Newsweek about a similar topic. Zakaria also talks about how Canada is the only industrialized country not to have a banking bailout. Check out both columns because they're chock full of information that you won't typically get from network or cable news.