November 03, 2010
His latest column tells us that he had:
” a scary thought …. What if — for all the hype about China, India and globalization — they’re actually underhyped? What if these sleeping giants are just finishing a 20-year process of getting the basic technological and educational infrastructure in place to become innovation hubs and that we haven’t seen anything yet?”
It’s difficult to know what in this story Friedman finds scary. The piece raises the prospect of these countries providing better and lower cost financial and technical services than those we currently receive from Wall Street and Silicon Valley.
It is not clear what Friedman’s problem is with getting lower cost services. This is the way trade is supposed to benefit economies. Of course, those who work on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley will be hurt, just as steel and auto workers have been hurt by low-cost competition, but the vast majority of the country does not work on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley.
If there is a point to Friedman’s piece, it is very difficult to understand what it could be.
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