The Recession’s Silver Lining
Posted on December 24th, 2008 in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
It’s about time: The last American factories making SUVs are closing.
I feel bad for the workers, but truth to tell, they’ve been living on borrowed time for years. These cars are a safety and environmental disaster, and they represent the spirit of self-indulgent and thoughtless excess that has characterized too much of America in recent years.
As Tom Friedman writes today,
My fellow Americans, we can’t continue in this mode of “Dumb as we wanna be.” We’ve indulged ourselves for too long with tax cuts that we can’t afford, bailouts of auto companies that have become giant wealth-destruction machines, energy prices that do not encourage investment in 21st-century renewable power systems or efficient cars, public schools with no national standards to prevent illiterates from graduating and immigration policies that have our colleges educating the world’s best scientists and engineers and then, when these foreigners graduate, instead of stapling green cards to their diplomas, we order them to go home and start companies to compete against ours.
Could you imagine how screwed we would be if John McCain, a man who truly didn’t seem to understand the watershed moment at which this country stands, won the election?
As the years go by, and SUVs fade from the roads, won’t it be nice not to feel menaced when crossing the street, or to be able actually to see in front of you while driving on the highway?
2 Responses
12/24/2008 3:10 pm
This is a terrific column, and very resonant with things I have been trying to say. I commented on the idiocy of our educating foreign students and then refusing to let them stay in the Globe a few weeks back: “We get tax exemptions not so we can help build the economy of China, but so we can help contribute to the economy of the United States.”
And Friedman’s comment “we’ve fallen into a trend of diverting and rewarding the best of our collective I.Q. to people doing financial engineering rather than real engineering” reminds me of a passage from Excellence Without a Soul: “the empty curriculum is so removed from the real world that many students learn how capitalist economies create jobs from the solicitations of companies eager to hire them. Something is wrong with our educational system when so many graduating Harvard seniors see consulting and investment banking as their best options for productive lives.”
There is a message in all this for higher education for sure. I wonder if anyone will think about what it is, or if we will be so totally focused on saving money that we won’t pause to think about mission.
12/24/2008 3:52 pm
Yes, a very good column, well anticipated by Harry. I hope you are right in your closing there, Richard, but my fear is that once we come out of the recession the old ways will return and the Next Thing on Wall St. will continue to lure. Since Obama will need to deal with Detroit by March, one way or the other, there’s some hope he will enforce a change there.