Eccentric Flower:201008/Parachutes Lawyers Wintel and China

When reading The Economist, I confess that I pay much closer attention to the United States, Europe, and Britain sections than the others. I can't bring myself to pay nearly as much attention as I should to the issues of Asia or Africa, although I try, and the heavy-finance-gibberish section is often impenetrable to me (I wish they would restate many of those articles in non-jargony terms; I know it can be done, but that's not what the primary readership of those articles wants, just as I'd get impatient if a programming article stopped every single time to explain what a pointer or a hash is); and the Business section often annoys me because that's the place where my and The Economist's worldviews most often part roads.

The Economist is a magazine (they prefer to call it a "newspaper") whose political worldview is progressive, in the literal sense, that they tend to favor what they see as forward, positive progress - and they don't particularly tread any party lines in doing so. They accept or reject an idea because they think it is a good or a bad idea, not because of its origin, and I respect them for that. However, that doesn't mean that I always agree with them on what is a good idea, and more often than not the places we disagree are on how unbridled capitalism should be allowed to be, and to what extent capitalism is inherently evil and/or corrupt.

Understand, I believe in making a modest profit for one's labor or value-added, at all times, to the extent that I am deeply suspicious of anything offered for free. I strongly believe that if you have something, anything, of value to offer the world then you should not offer it unless you will get some form of recompensation, however intangible, which is meaningful to you in exchange for it. (Nitpickers please note this does not rule the concept of "altruism" out of bounds, merely adds a definitional wrinkle to it.)

But what I see these days is a bunch of people in tall glass buildings determined to bleed everything dry they touch, without being forced in any way to be penalized for the consequences of their actions. In short, when in an article on executive compensation packages after said executives get sacked, The Economist opines:

my impulse is to get a little irritated and ask exactly when capitalism was deemed to depend so heavily on risk-taking, why one cannot be sedate and yet successful, and how big a fool you have to be to disagree with Warren Buffett.

Then we have an article about the new head of the Harvard Business School - already you see this is not going to be an article that makes my day a brighter place, since to me the HBS is like the wellspring of hell - which contains this gem:

Wow. So, Economist, trying to instill any sort of collective sense of ethical conduct in businessmen is a waste of time? What universal "moral values" did you have in mind, then, exactly?

I also gasp at the bald-faced assertion that "business progresses through creative destruction," stated with the apparent implication that this is a good thing.

I'd write them a letter, but, judging from the letters they print, I'm neither intelligent nor significant enough to do so.

The Economist also had three other interesting articles this week - well, all their articles are interesting, but three of special note to the folks here. One for the lawyers, one for the hackers, and one for everyone I've been trying to sell on a particular idea unsuccessfully for years.

The one which will be of interest to lawyers is about the difficulties in globalization of law practice - the hurdles that prevent lawyers from operating in other countries and so forth. (N.B. It will amuse you that I had to try two different searches to get that link because The Economist spells "globalization" with an S.)

Apart from one quibble because I thought the state of New York had bar reciprocity with some other states and I hate it when articles don't mention that Louisiana specifically does not have reciprocity because we are not based on British common law but the Napoleonic Code - hey, I said it was a quibble - it's a pretty good article. Actually there's one paragraph that really made me sit up and think.

The article points out that the last completely-closed frontier for lawyers is India, where it is illegal even for a non-Indian lawyer to play an advisory role. They decry this protectionism, but then add:

See, here's the thing: I'm on record as approving of all sorts of curbs on legal practice, and especially on restraining how and where lawyers can promote themselves. I still believe that allowing lawyers to advertise in the U.S. was a mistake. (Yes, I'm aware you disagree. Thanks.) But I also don't see any reason why a lawyer who demonstrates competence with the local laws to the local authorities' satisfaction shouldn't be allowed to practice law there - why a lawyer, if he were capable, shouldn't be allowed to practice law anywhere in the world he wanted.

From which we can conclude two things: 1) Sometimes I countenance restraint of free trade and sometimes I don't; 2) if it's all of a parcel, then I will almost always lean in favor of the more unconstrained case. In other words, if it's really true that India's restrictions on its own lawyers are intertwined hopelessly with their not letting in outside ones, then I'd argue for removal of its own internal restrictions, and not for continuing to clamp down in all directions.

The article for the hackers is about how the Wintel marriage is drifting apart, and what this means for everybody else in the industry (and for you, the user), and what market forces this split is in response to.

I'll just give their conclusion, because it does not diminish the interesting points made in the rest of the article:

But, for once, it's worth reading the comments on an article, trolls and all - among other things, lurking in there you will find a sense of the deep and lingering sour taste Microsoft still leaves in a lot of people's mouths, and about five thousand people pointing out that Linux is totally missing from the article. In fact the article says as much about The Economist's tech biases as it does about the actual tech market.

The last article I wanted to note is about labor unrest in China. I won't try to summarize it, but will just say that for some years now I have been arguing that the hand-wringing about Chinese labor is an overblown response to a condition that is at best temporary. (I grant this is neither consolation nor relief to manufacturing centers in the U.S. who have seen their economies evaporate, but I'm talking more about the general Sinophobia that seems to possess some people.)

As cheap labor markets arrive in poor countries, eventually the standard of living goes up slightly, however marginal the wages. Longevity increases and birth rate falls; the population ages a bit and cannot be as easily exploited. Also, people who formerly identified themselves as ex-rural "we put up with this because it's so much better than we could get as farm labor" begin to identify themselves as factory workers instead and take a collective identity from that, or as The Economist says it:

All of this means that eventually they get fed up and they force some rise in their standard of living. And they do this again and again. After a while, they get expensive enough that they are no longer a source of cheap labor to large multinationals, which pack up and take their business to the next poor country down the road. And then it all happens again.

What this means ultimately is that China's manufacturing market is eventually as doomed as ours is ... and that in a few more generations, some of the money will come back here; with no place offering significant savings over manufacturing in the U.S., the "made in America" label will suddenly look attractive as a selling point once again.

But by then we will need to train industrial workers again from scratch, because the existing blue-collar tradition in this country is dead, dead, dead, denial notwithstanding, and it will be all but forgotten by the time those sort of jobs come back.