After the war, America funded 101 German orchestras and 83 opera companies including the contemporary world festival at Darmstadt. That funding was through the OSS and later the CIA during the Cold War. They supported a serious, cultivated and positive view of Germany that had not existed since before Weimar. When the Americans returned home after much cultural success in Germany, they embraced Trinkets and Trash entertainment models here that were more conducive to their Neo-Classical Economic models. One should note that Vienna doesn't pay much attention to the Viennese school of Economics either. American Artists including conservative Senator Dr. Tom Coburn couldn't wait for his daughter to sing at the state sponsored Opera house in Wien. William Buckley and the current Neo-conservatives were socialist liberals for Europe but when Buckley came home he bought one of the three classical radio stations in New York City and turned a profit changing it to Rock and Roll junk.
Today we have only one excellent, very limited in range, classical music station and the most expensive opera company by twice of any in the world. Both WQXR and the Metropolitan Opera blankets the wealthy with good music but most New Yorkers have less classical radio than Tulsa or the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York. As for Germany? Heilige Kunst is taken much more seriously by the Germans who consider it the root of their creativity and innovation. It was not the 20th century that gave the Germans their character but the blossoming of the 19th when they gave the greatest musicians, writers, artists and architects to the world. Gunter Grass said that when the provincial shame of Hitler would have destroyed the German spirit it was Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms that brought them back. I would add that it was the Americans who paid for it in order to prove that the Soviets weren't cultured ones in the world. The West Germans didn't piss away the East Germans either but in a relatively short time brought them back into the national fold. No leaving them behind because they lost. I've lost so many friends to immigration to Germany, Austria and Switzerland. In my old age I miss them greatly and wish that the English here had been as cultivated or maybe just a little less plentiful. REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson Sent: Monday, November 21, 2011 3:19 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION; pete Subject: Re: [Futurework] Manufacturing returns to the US? Pete, Very interesting -- and very significant indeed. What the Globe & Mail article doesn't say (although the original source report of the Boston Consulting Group may well do) is the higher quality tendency of American manufacturing production when compared with China's. While China has absorbed a great deal of America's and Western Europe's low-skill factory production of consumer goods, most high-skill engineering has remained -- as also many other production goods and technologies that are on the leading edge of R&D. And, while China's state education system retains its authoritarian, rote-learning character, which severely cramps the creativity (though not the 'copy-ability' !) of its people, it is likely to remain so. This is something that worries both the Chinese and the Japanese governments but, while being an integral part of deep, centuries-old cultures, can't change anytime soon. But complacent we can't be. While America, Germany and the UK continue to scoop up most of the Nobel Prizes in the sciences, and thus may subsequently regain positive balances of trade in due course (or increase them in the case of Germany) this won't necessarily be of any benefit to the majority of their populations who are presently sinking in skills and earnings, nor to any early amelioration of their vast governmental debts which even now are still growing and threaten to capsize us. (Germany still has a manageable governmental debt but won't have for very much longer if it has to continue subsidizing at least six other countries in the Eurozone.) Keith At 04:00 21/11/2011, Pete Vincent wrote: Someone sent this to me, it's a couple of weeks old: http://www.ctv.ca/generic/generated/static/business/article2041599.html Excerpts: The United States exported more goods and services in March than in any single month in its history: $172.7-billion (U.S.) worth. It was the country's 21st consecutive month of rising exports, pushing the year-over-year increase to 20.9 per cent. In these 12 record-setting months, exports reached within one-tenth of 1 per cent of $2-trillion - more than four times the cost of the country's imports of crude oil. This is significant. People are starting to take notice. Markets writer Joseph Lazzaro (on the Daily Finance website) anticipates that the U.S. up-trend in exports could last for years and turn its intractable trade deficit into a surplus. More dramatically, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), a global management consulting firm, discerns "a renaissance" in manufacturing that will, within five years, lure major U.S. corporations to return home from China. [...] BCG said many more such decisions will occur as wage rates for skilled workers rise in China, year after year, at double-digit rates. [...] Harold Sirkin, a BCG senior partner, said in a release. "We expect net labour costs for manufacturing in China and the U.S. to converge by around 2015. As a result ... you're going to see a lot more products `Made in the USA' in the next five years". At current rates, China's wages could double in as few as five years. // The article continues that US exports to several countries have risen 20-40% in the last year, and Since 1947, U.S. manufacturers have precisely tracked the sevenfold increase in U.S. GDP. In 1980, they produced 22 per cent of the world's manufactured goods. In 2011, they still do, while China produces 15 per cent. Through the entire rise of China, in other words, U.S. manufacturers have maintained their original share of global production. This single industry would rank, all on its own, as the eighth-largest economy in the world. // I am somewhat suspect of the facts in this article. I wonder if it is rather true that these "made in USA" articles in fact have the last couple of bolts and the nameplate only added in the US, with the component parts all funneling in from the usual suspects. _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2011/11/
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