As the world is watching a looming European implosion with abated breath, the tide is quietly beginning to turn on both sides of the Pacific.
"China's overwhelming cost advantage over the U.S. is shrinking fast. Within five years, a Boston Consulting Group analysis concludes, rising Chinese wages, higher U.S. productivity, a weaker dollar, and other factors will virtually close the cost gap between the U.S. and China for many goods consumed in North America."
Made in America, Again - Why Manufacturing Will Return to the U.S., Boston Consulting Group, August 2011 Click here
The gloom may resonate with many Americans that "We had Steve Jobs. We had Johnny Cash. And we had Bob Hope. But now we have lost our jobs, our cash, and our hope".
Perhaps hope may be just around the corner if the American body politic, driven by the people, will re-build a new America that cherishes hard-working manufacturing that creates jobs for the many rather than financial wizardry creating mega paper profits for the few.
This is what is being demanded by angry Americans taking to the streets across the country in a "Occupy Wall Street" citizenry movement, dubbed by some as the "American Spring".
The tide is also begin to turn on the other side of the Pacific as China is going green and high-tech. Nothwithstanding some false starts such as the planned Dongtan eco-city near Shanghai, the following are two mind-boggling, massive knowledge-based eco-city developments backed by the highest levels of the Chinese leadership.
Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City
Click here
Guangzhou Revamped as New Sustainable Super City
Click here
They are amongst hundreds of eco-cities planned or taking shape across the whole of China as mayors and party secretaries vie with one another to burnish their green credentials, which have recently been included as key criteria for career promotion.
These are heady changes, considering that at most a few decades ago if not more recently, Tianjin and Guangzhou were notable for an ecology of an industrial wasteland.
Indeed, there are signs across the globe that cataclysmic events are quickening, including a Eurozone threatening to disintegrate, a worsening global financial climate, a domino phenomenon of the Arab Spring, and now the stirrings of an "American Spring". Added to the above heady changes on both sides of the Pacific, some of the more mystically-inclined may not resist comparing this quickening of the global zeitgeist to what is foretold as preceding the so-called End of the 5,125 year-long cycle of the Mayan "Long Count" Calendar on 21.12.2012 with apocalyptic or transformational New Age connotations. Click here
Coming back to earth, a few sparrows naturally don't make a summer. But considering powerful underlining forces of the age of scarcity, a resurgent Malthusian spectre, energy security, climate change, the global surge of an internet-enabled middle-class, past development trajectories of economies like Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, coupled with a "flat" world that is increasingly interdependent and inter-connected, chances are that the world is about to enter into a new era when lifestyles and aspirations would change and more things would be done "outside the box".
In any event, it is always better to be aware of some these epoch-defining changes and undercurrents than to be caught totally unprepared for "black swans", of a pleasant variety or otherwise, if and when they do appear.
Best regards,
Andrew
