In the early 90s, maybe 91 or 92 I saw deliveries of coal by donkey cart in Kunming. They were heating the buildings with the coal, big blocks of it. A city of maybe 4 million. Everything 3 or 4 stories tall, bicycles, quiet streets. By 95 and 96 there were high rises going up everywhere in town, streets full of cars, no longer much able to ride a bike.
The waitress at the tourist cafe had an engineering degree, the two guys operating the photo copy store both had multiple engineering degrees. From key universities too, I'm not talking about just pieces of paper, very well educated highly intelligent young men and women. Key universities the credits are transferable anywhere worldwide.
I thought what is China doing with all of these engineers, their talents are wasted. I guess they went ahead and got jobs after all. By 01 the 12 hour bus ride to Dali often on dirt roads was now either a train ride or on a modern Boeing 737. The pace and rate of modernization is hard to convey.
In Taiwan an exec at Mitsubishi explained it like this. They can take an engineer, and if he has an aptitude for leadership or sales or whatever and might make a good executive, they send him to business school. The reverse is seldom possible, few business grads or in the case of the US few lawyers, can handle the grind necessary to take and pass difficult math, chemistry, metallurgy etc classes. Engineers can still write poetry in iambic pentameter, how many poets can understand discrete mathematics?
I think China will figure out how to loosen up on things like the suppression of minorities in Xinjiang and Tibet, and they'll have a modern thriving country too.
Interesting insights based on personal experience. What they have going for them is authoritarian decision-making that avoids the "messiness" of popular debate. What they don't have is freedom of speech, religion, and political choice. I would certainly wish that they would become more "liberal" internally while abandoning their aggressive foreign policies, but I don't see much chance of it happening, and support U.S. economic, diplomatic, and military policies that deter their foreign aggression.
I find this commentary especially interesting because I had a career as a civil engineer, but also had a degree in economics and a personal interest in environmental protection. As such, I avoid over-generalizing about the desirability of more mega-projects in the U.S. such as mass transit systems.
A big advantage to life in the U.S. is the opportunity to own a single family home, which is not limited to "the rich" except in certain densely populated metropolitan areas. This relates to the widespread ownership of automobiles, supported by a network of highways and roads, and an abundance of airports, that enables much more freedom of travel than any rail system.
On the other hand, the fact that this system is highly dependent on cheap fossil fuels and abundant land that is desirable for residential and recreational use creates the problem of sustainability, especially with a population that continues to increase due largely to immigration. My overall take is that the U.S. should be emulating countries like those in Scandinavia, which have achieved a high and sustainable quality of life with modest consumption of natural resources, rather than emulating China, with its authoritarian control over people living in crowded, often polluted conditions.
In the early 90s, maybe 91 or 92 I saw deliveries of coal by donkey cart in Kunming. They were heating the buildings with the coal, big blocks of it. A city of maybe 4 million. Everything 3 or 4 stories tall, bicycles, quiet streets. By 95 and 96 there were high rises going up everywhere in town, streets full of cars, no longer much able to ride a bike.
The waitress at the tourist cafe had an engineering degree, the two guys operating the photo copy store both had multiple engineering degrees. From key universities too, I'm not talking about just pieces of paper, very well educated highly intelligent young men and women. Key universities the credits are transferable anywhere worldwide.
I thought what is China doing with all of these engineers, their talents are wasted. I guess they went ahead and got jobs after all. By 01 the 12 hour bus ride to Dali often on dirt roads was now either a train ride or on a modern Boeing 737. The pace and rate of modernization is hard to convey.
In Taiwan an exec at Mitsubishi explained it like this. They can take an engineer, and if he has an aptitude for leadership or sales or whatever and might make a good executive, they send him to business school. The reverse is seldom possible, few business grads or in the case of the US few lawyers, can handle the grind necessary to take and pass difficult math, chemistry, metallurgy etc classes. Engineers can still write poetry in iambic pentameter, how many poets can understand discrete mathematics?
I think China will figure out how to loosen up on things like the suppression of minorities in Xinjiang and Tibet, and they'll have a modern thriving country too.
Interesting insights based on personal experience. What they have going for them is authoritarian decision-making that avoids the "messiness" of popular debate. What they don't have is freedom of speech, religion, and political choice. I would certainly wish that they would become more "liberal" internally while abandoning their aggressive foreign policies, but I don't see much chance of it happening, and support U.S. economic, diplomatic, and military policies that deter their foreign aggression.
I find this commentary especially interesting because I had a career as a civil engineer, but also had a degree in economics and a personal interest in environmental protection. As such, I avoid over-generalizing about the desirability of more mega-projects in the U.S. such as mass transit systems.
A big advantage to life in the U.S. is the opportunity to own a single family home, which is not limited to "the rich" except in certain densely populated metropolitan areas. This relates to the widespread ownership of automobiles, supported by a network of highways and roads, and an abundance of airports, that enables much more freedom of travel than any rail system.
On the other hand, the fact that this system is highly dependent on cheap fossil fuels and abundant land that is desirable for residential and recreational use creates the problem of sustainability, especially with a population that continues to increase due largely to immigration. My overall take is that the U.S. should be emulating countries like those in Scandinavia, which have achieved a high and sustainable quality of life with modest consumption of natural resources, rather than emulating China, with its authoritarian control over people living in crowded, often polluted conditions.