College Education in a Barack Obama Administration

In an increasingly competitive global and knowledge-intensive world, it is extremely important for a government to provide mechanisms to ease the burden of college education among today's college-bound students. While Barack Obama's proposed campaign promise is 100 hours of community service in exchange for a $4,000 tuition credit, it is the approach that is to be commended. 

100 hours translates to about 12 days (of 8 hours each), or about 3 months of elapsed time if a student uses only weekends to perform the community service.

Let us hope some effective educational program on these lines will indeed be implemented by the Barack Obama administration.

China, India and U.S. Immigration Policy

Globalization has been occurring briskly while the U.S. debates on immigration reforms. It seems to me that the U.S. lawmakers have not quite comprehended the magnitude and speed of the change that has occurred so far, and will continue to occur for the foreseeable future. There is a definite need within the U.S. to create an immigration policy that encourages talented minds to migrate to the United States; otherwise, America's competitiveness is going to be compromised. The future will be more and more influenced by the knowledge economy, and countries are going to need educated and talented minds to keep the economy vibrant and growing.

These thoughts are on my first visit to China; a travelogue can be found elsewhere. The hard work that I see occurring everywhere in China and the comparable benefits that are available to anyone that can afford it are signs that China can compete very effectively with U.S. and other multinational businesses worldwide. If English language is a handicap at all now for China, it is just a matter of time before the language arbitrage is reduced to nothing.

The good news is that all of this globalization is a way to unify humanity. After all, country demarcations are nothing but man-made devices to manage the population in some orderly manner.

The World is Getting Flatter

Today, I came across a new service that Google has introduced. Free. Google 411. Yes, a directory service that is free (and only costs what you have already paid for the telephone company). I tried it out and it works! Granted it has some constraints for now ... but that will be easily remedied, given that Google has a large army of talented software engineers.

Tom Friedman has earned himself a place in the history books by writing the book The World is Flat. The implication of Google 411 is enormous. Anyone in the world can find out, for a relative pittance, this kind of local information. Even though most of this information is already available through Google Local and such, the simplicity of the man-machine interface of the telephone service is what will make this usable by many more.

If someone - Larry Page or Sergey Brin or, even, Eric Schmidt- were to take the trouble to describe in a book how they have built Google so far, that will be immensely valuable to entrepreneurs!

Hiring in Information Technology

In an article titled Gartner: IT hiring on the rise again, a certain optimism is described regarding hiring of IT talent in particular in the financial industry. Is it time to rejoice? Has globalization worked itself through?

Outsourcing Innovation

The story this blog entry's title's hyperlink is, I believe, the effect of the Internet as a great equalizer. The summary of the article is ably given by one of the last sentences of the article (The print version of the article has greater pictorial content that illustrates that 70% of PDA designs are outsourced, but the design outsourcing of networking equipment is only starting):

"What is clear is that an army of in-house engineers no longer means a company can control its fate. Instead, the winners will be those most adept at marshaling the creativity and skills of workers around the world."

What all of this means is that equality of opportunity, and commensurate (re)distribution of wealth, is taking place across the globe. The purpose of many of the economic systems of the present and past is, in a sense, exactly that: How to produce a society where prosperity is somehow "equally" distributed? But, now, the desirable transformation is taking place, slowly.

Vive l'Internet!

Globalization & Equalization of Culture

When the Internet hit the marketplace in a big way in the 1990s, it was lauded with many different adjectives. John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems said, as PCWorld reported in 1999, that the Net will be a great equalizer, an "equalizer between people, companies, and countries."

Today in the San Jose Mercury News, there is a story of an engineer who moved his family to Bangalore, India for a couple of years. (You need a subscription that is free, to access the article on the web). What is interesting about this is that the engineer is an American who chose to live in Bangalore for a couple of years just so that the offshored work would get done effectively. In the process, his entire family moved with him as well, and their presence in Bangalore is a great equalizer of culture.

I recall, before I came to the United States from Bangalore years ago, that my folks in Bangalore were very apprehensive of how I would fare in far away America, who would keep an eye on me, etc. This engineer's presence in Bangalore would be but a step in removing such apprehensions.

There have been any number of stories written up on the loss of American jobs, and something definitely has to be done about that. But the cultural aspect of this story is what is valuable. It is this sort of cross migration that will firmly establish the vedic saying वसुदैव कुटुम्बकम - The whole world is one family - in this world where no day goes by without some sort of violence, terrorism, etc.

Chinese and Indians are Buying.

Many people may not realize the level of globalization that is occurring in the world today. For a perspective of several CEOs from the G7 countries, click here. Basically, the economic growth happening in China and India will, in addition to providing powerful markets for western products, produce economic giants that will dot the global landscape by, for example, making acquisitions of western businesses.

What does this development mean to individual investors? Load up on select Chinese and Indian company stocks.

"The China Price"

If you are a student of globalization of the economy, the December 6, 2004, issue of BusinessWeek is a must read in general and the cover story titled "The China Price", in particular.

Countless economists will prognosticate as to what might happen: What will happen to the overall U.S. economy? If even the so-called white collar jobs move out of the U.S., only service jobs will remain.

It'd seem that the proper way out of this global economic climate for any country is to leverage what can be accomplished elsewhere and build on it. The key word here is 'build'; build on what other nations can produce relatively inexpensively. In other words, be a valuable part of the global ecosystem. Ultimately, the value of any product or service is a function of how the product or service enhances the life of a human being, be it economically or in an aesthetic way.