Wikipedia BEFORE YOU READ TODAY'S LIFE-KNOWLEDGE SHARING ENJOY THE ABOVE Animated map showing the development of European colonial empires from 1492 to present...Have fun watching as the map scrolls through milestone years portraying the wealth "distribution" from nations who had wealth to nations who were poor through colonialization of entire humanity by a few humans....   ......GLOBALIZATION INVENTED AND LED BY USA FOR DECADES IS BEING NOW PROMOTED BY STILL NO.1 SUPERPOWER USA AS "LOCALNOMICS"...... toonpoolcom   Globalization used to be a one-way street that led away from America. e bringing opportunity back home to America. Welcome to the era of localnomics.... .....THE HILITES OF LOCALNOMICS.... (from DebatePoliticsCom) 1. As oil prices increase, it becomes more attractive for U.S. businesses to manufacture closer to their market. 2. Foreign countries are have more corrupt business cultures and are riskier. 3. As wages in China outpace productivity increases, it becomes even cheaper to hire high-skilled domestic workers to control robots that handle the physically demanding work that used to be done manually. 4. Smaller more local banks, which can serve the needs of local small businesses, will dominate post-financial crash. 5. The world has a surplus of low-skilled workers, and a shortage of medium and high skilled workers. 6. All job creation over the next 4 years will require at least a two year degree. 7. There is a growing gap between what employers want and what degrees and skills students are graduating with. 8. Amid political gridlock, employers are taking matters into their own hands, setting up degree programs with local community colleges to meet their skilled labor needs.    ....AND LOCONOMICS CAN BE REALIZED IN FIVE RULE STEPS.... RULE NO. 1: Hometown Bankers Know Best RULE NO. 2: Manufacturing Matters RULE NO. 3: Blue Collar Jobs Go High-Tech RULE NO. 4: Closer Is Faster, And Faster Is Good RULE NO. 5: Local Leaders Must Step Up The above national economics-revival philosophy demonstrates the continuing and seemingly eternal superpower strength of USA and its and its citizens on this planet Earth...a showcase of how their beautifully human Declaration of Independence:          "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."... .....is still as live as it it was at its birth some 225 years ago "spearheaded" by the minds and thoughts of New England Puritans... PVAF as per its mandate to share Life-sciences Knowledge with the entire humanity on this planet Earth today shares a very profound article with the above noted title and content summary which PVAF believes will help earthlings in all nations to see the long-term light at the end of the tunnel after the 2008 world-wide financial meltdown...which melted welfare, well-being and happiness of majority of earthlings to a degree...may be sometimes with some short-terms gains here and there...  Today's sharing is so profoundly simplistic but with pregnant potential as wordsmithed by Time Magazine's evergreen financial simplification wizard Ms. Rana Foroohar, is an assistant managing editor for Time magazine....who surgically presents every week complex financial life-topics with bare Truth so that one wonders why the leaders of earthlings everywhere cannot emulate and apply the Truth to lead earthlings to short-medium-long term happiness.....   . And sharing thus....without further much ado...click on the next line to enjoy the Truth on the next webpage and may be you can lead your leaders to the Truth....remembering that you can lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink....and just a reminder for you to share your take on this sharing today by just clicking the COMMENT button in the header of this sharing....and please do go after the hyperlinked words by PVAF volunteers at your convenience...... ....welcome to real reading today.... ...and of course lighten up with some chuckling...but please stay serious... &  CartoonMovmentCom Daniel Shea for TIME Caterpillar workers at the company's recently expanded plant in East Peoria.   The Economy's New Rules: Go Glocal  Time Magazine, USA Edition: Monday, August 20, 2012L By Rana Foroohar If there's a single company that illustrates the huge range of opportunities and challenges facing the U.S. economy today, it might be Caterpillar, the heavy-machinery giant based in Peoria, Ill. Like most other firms, Cat took a hit following the financial crisis. But since then, it's bounced back--and how. After a strong second quarter, the firm is on track for a second record-breaking year in a row and will likely sell $70 billion of its famous yellow earthmovers, tractors and mining equipment globally. As productsAs products roll off the line at the recently expanded East Peoria factory, every one is marked with a flag that designates its final destination. There are a lot of Chinese, Indian and Australian flags. But there are plenty of American ones too, and their numbers are growing. "We put those flags on a few years back. I wanted our workers to understand that globalization isn't necessarily about someone taking your job," says Caterpillar CEO Doug Oberhelman. Indeed, Caterpillar thinks less about a single world market than many regional ones. The company is global, but where it can, it sources and produces locally, which is a natural hedge against everything from oil prices to currency risk to changing customer tastes. The bottom line: jobs and growth are split more or less equally between the U.S. and the rest of the world. This isn't how globalization was supposed to work. Until quite recently, it was seen as a one-way street. American companies, which led the charge four decades or so ago into growing global markets, were its ambassadors, and American workers, whose wages and upward mobility were flattened, were the victims. The core idea was that globalization, technological innovation and unfettered free trade would erase historical and geographic boundaries, making the world ever more economically interconnected and alike. (Foreign-affairs writer Tom Friedman famously encapsulated this notion with the title of his book The World Is Flat.) In this vision, all nations would be on an even playing field, and the U.S. would come under more and more competitive pressure from eager upstart nations. It worked something like that from the mid-1980s to 2008, a period of unprecedented market calm that economists call the Great Moderation. Not so much anymore. The truth is that the world was never as flat as we thought, and it's getting bumpier. The flaws in the premise are coming into focus. Consider the following: when energy prices and political risk go up, far-flung global supply chains make less economic sense. Low-wage workers in China look attractive--until robots operated by highly skilled laborers at home are able to do their jobs even more cheaply. Unfettered free trade seems great until the world's fastest-growing economies won't play by the rules of the game. Since the financial crisis, fragmentation rather than unity has become the norm. You can see it everywhere, from the euro-zone crisis to Communist Party infighting in China. In just the past few months, Argentines renationalized their biggest oil company, and several nations put capital controls on their currencies. Rich and poor regions from the E.U. to Japan and from China to Turkey are ramping up tariff increases, export restrictions and self-serving regulatory changes. World Trade Organization director general Pascal Lamy calls the rise in protectionism "alarming" and frets that we are headed back to the 1930s. Given all the risks out there in the world, the 2% economy--in place of our historical 3%-to-4% yearly growth--has become the new normal for the foreseeable future. So is it possible to survive or even thrive in the new normal? The answer is yes, but only if you know where to look and how to pivot. A key truism in this new age of volatility is that "everything local will take clear priority," says Peter Atwater, a financial researcher who studies social mood and the markets. That means much more focus on regional economic ecosystems and how to foster job creation at home instead of relying on global markets to raise all boats. In short, we need to be aware of the myths of globalization and how we can unleash untapped economic power closer to home. Here are some of the new rules of localnomics. RULE NO. 1 Hometown Bankers Know Best During the Great Moderation, finance was the industry that ruled the world. It greased the wheels of globalization, spreading capital like pixie dust, and came to represent some 30% of total corporate profitability in the U.S., up from about 11% in 1975. Even after the financial crisis, banks represent a greater percentage of the economy than ever before. Slowly but surely, that's changing. The Dodd-Frank banking legislation, which is still under construction, may well be toughened in the wake of several new banking scandals. Regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are making a new push to rein in banks, and even the Fed may be considering ways to goose the mortgage market by forcing banks to lend. As public cries for a safer financial system grow louder, it's quite likely that banks will eventually be broken up into smaller, more manageable pieces and forced to hold more capital, moving the industry away from global laissez-faire business as usual and toward a more traditional banking model. Already, in Europe, banking is balkanizing along national lines. There, the rollback of the decade-long, cross-border integration of banking may turn out to be a bad thing, because it underscores a lack of faith in the euro and will expose deeper rifts in the continental economy as a whole. But in the U.S., the shifts in banking may be a happy event. Too-big-to-manage institutions may be reined in or even split up, allowing smaller entities to focus on what they do best, be it high-flying trading or local lending. (Being closer to the ground, such commercial banks will know their consumers better, which could mitigate risk and increase capital flows to small businesses.) As profit margins shrink, the fees banks charge may get higher. But banking may also become more the way it is in It's a Wonderful Life, "which has certain advantages in terms of reconnecting people back to their local communities," says Atwater. RULE NO. 2 Manufacturing Matters As finance fades into the backdrop, manufacturing takes center stage, and each hometown accomplishment brings crucial carryover effects for the surrounding economy. It's not being overly dramatic to say that the world is on the verge of a new industrial revolution as manufacturing regains its traditional role as a global growth driver. Manufacturing's share of global output is 17.4%, the highest it's been in over a decade. The growth has been driven not only by China but also by the U.S. (the second-biggest factory nation by output), which got a boost from the government's Detroit bailouts. Indeed, if the U.S. manufacturing economy were a nation, it would be the ninth largest in the world. Government support is certainly one of the reasons for the boom. Manufacturing is politically very important because it's one of the few areas of the economy that is creating solid middle-income jobs. (See Rule No. 3. Export-oriented jobs pay 9% more on average.) The reason the latest U.S. jobs numbers aren't worse than they are is that Detroit has been holding its own. A weaker dollar and more-competitive global wage rates have also helped U.S. manufacturing, as have two other key trends: the rise of emerging markets, which buy a growing chunk of American exports, and a homegrown energy boom in shale gas and oil, which is goosing other parts of the economy like commercial construction and agriculture. This underscores manufacturing's important spillover effect for the rest of the economy. The Bureau of Economic Analysis calculates that every $1 of manufacturing GDP drives an incremental $1.42 of activity in the nonmanufacturing economy. That fact was recently heralded by, of all people, Airbus CEO Fabrice Brgier in a July 2 announcement in Mobile, Ala., where the European aircraft giant is opening a new plant, citing a more competitive labor and growth climate in the U.S. as compared with Europe. It was a bitter day for the French and the Germans. Manufacturing is a key source of innovation, accounting for 70% of private-sector R&D and 90% of patents issued in the U.S. When a high-end manufacturing operation like Airbus sets up shop in a community, the benefits stay disproportionately within the local ecosystem. Spillover benefits decline by half when you go 700 miles beyond a manufacturing site, according to economist Wolfgang Keller. So how to create more of these local hubs? Ensure access to a highly skilled labor force, connect educators to job creators, and help smaller businesses become suppliers to big firms. (See Rules 3 and 4.) RULE NO. 3 Blue Collar Jobs Go High-Tech At the Caterpillar factory line in East Peoria, yet another important trend of the new normal is on display: labor bifurcation. Extremely cheap workers--robots--now do much of the tedious, physically demanding welding at the plant. Other work is done by high-end technicians, many of whom need computer skills to manipulate the robots. The number of human employees hasn't actually decreased over the past few years as the firm has added robots, but their skill level has increased. Welding is no longer a job for someone with only a high school degree. It's something that requires advanced in-house training or a community-college certification. This situation is a microcosm of the global labor market. Even as Apple recently announced it would work with its supplier Foxconn to cut hours and boost pay for laborers in its Chinese factories, Foxconn itself has plans to deploy about 1 million new industrial robots in factories across the Middle Kingdom over the next three years. Chinese workers are getting more expensive, with pay rising about 17% a year, but their productivity isn't increasing quite so fast. That's one reason the Boston Consulting Group estimates that within five years, as many as 3 million manufacturing jobs could come back to the U.S. But they won't be old-style, cheap-labor jobs. They'll be high-skill, high-demand positions. Indeed, 63% of U.S. jobs will require postsecondary training by 2018. The U.S. economy will create more than 14 million new jobs over the next 10 years, but only for workers with at least a community-college degree. These jobs--for people like dental hygienists, electricians and entry-level software engineers--would allow millions of people to move from living on the edge to being middle class. The problem is that a low percentage of college students in the U.S.--30% at four-year colleges and 1 in 4 at two-year colleges--finish their degrees. Some of that is about money, but it also reflects a relative lack of effort in the U.S. to connect educators with companies, particularly compared with what's being done in growth machines like Germany. The result is a mismatch between degrees and jobs that some economists, like Harvard's Rosabeth Moss Kanter, believe is responsible for as much as a third of the increase in unemployment since the Great Recession. Tech-oriented community colleges with links to industry are an obvious solution, and the Obama Administration's latest budget proposes $8 billion to fund such institutions. But political gridlock has stalled the proposal. So businesses like Caterpillar and Siemens are taking matters into their own hands, setting up programs with local community colleges. (Cities, take note: these programs can be job magnets. Caterpillar set up an engineering design center in South Dakota because of a strong community-college system there.) High-tech service companies like Microsoft, Cisco and IBM are starting six-year combined high school and community-college programs designed to churn out qualified midlevel employees. One such program, P-Tech, a public-private partnership led by IBM, has been adopted by Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City and Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago as part of an effort to boost employment and growth. Expect private companies to take on an even greater role in education while local leaders become major economic actors. RULE NO. 4 Closer Is Faster, And Faster Is Good One of the most amazing things about globalization is that for all the press it gets, it's not nearly as broad-based as you would think. European business-school professor Pankaj Ghemawat's recent book World 3.0 lays out in detail how the world was never really all that flat to begin with. His numbers, which tweak some official tallies to account for what he believes are various errors in calculation, are compelling: by his estimates, exports account for only about 20% of the world economy, cross-border foreign direct investment is only 9% of all investment, only 15% of venture-capital money is deployed outside home borders, less than 2% of all phone calls are international, less than a quarter of Internet traffic is routed across a national border and about 90% of the world's people will never leave the country in which they were born. "The challenge isn't too much globalization," says Ghemawat. "It's too little." But that's a hard sell politically at a time when the dark side of globalization--namely, growing inequality within nations--has resulted in a strong sense that an elite group of people and companies are flying safely above all the troubles in the global economy while the majority of those on the ground suffer. This was brought front and center earlier this year when an Apple executive being interviewed by the New York Times about why the iPhone is mostly made outside the U.S. was quoted as saying, "We [Apple] don't have an obligation to solve America's problems." The statement implied that not only should Apple put jobs wherever it was cheapest to do so globally (which is still mainly in Asia) but that this was a relatively seamless process. But the company's recent labor problems with its supplier Foxconn in China prove that doing business globally is hardly simple. And companies with complex global supply chains have not only labor issues to contend with but also natural disasters (remember how last year's tsunami and earthquakes in Japan disrupted auto-supply chains and sank industry growth for several quarters), high energy costs that make shipping more expensive and risks of corruption (as in the case of Walmart's scandal in Mexico). The laissez-faire attitude toward globalization that prevailed during the Great Moderation seems decidedly naive today. "For much of the last 15 years, it seemed like the attitude was that anytime you could find a lower cost anywhere in the global supply chain, you did it, with no thought of the difficulties or risks that things could go wrong," says Gene Sperling, head of the National Economic Council. "More U.S. companies are rethinking that calculation, and that holds open the promise of more location and insourcing here." UPS, which moves 2% to 3% of global GDP annually, says it views supply-chain disruption as the No. 1 risk facing multinational businesses today. Mitch Free, who runs MFG.com one of the world's largest online marketplaces for the manufacturing industry, says he's seeing a big trend toward regional and local insourcing not only because of risk mitigation but because consumer demand for all things to be newer, faster, better is shortening the life cycle for products (as little as six weeks from production to market in many cases). The trend toward hyperlocal product customization to suit individual customer needs in everything from jeans to ditch diggers also favors just-in-time, local supply chains. "The dynamic is not so much that American firms are bringing jobs back to the U.S. from abroad as it is that companies everywhere are bringing jobs and operations closer to where their customers are," says Free. "It's all about regionalization and localization rather than globalization." Indeed, Caterpillar nurtures a network of about 2,000 local suppliers in the Illinois area alone, many of whom make a good living designing and producing customized goods for the firm--items destined for particular U.S. markets or specialized needs. Where things can be sourced locally, they are, in every Caterpillar territory internationally. "It allows us to better understand the needs of the local market and adjust the product quickly," says Oberhelman, "but it's also a natural currency and energy-cost hedge." Companies are also starting to realize that localnomics can help support their revenue growth. Suppliers can also buy things from their customers, and customers can be suppliers too. IBM, which sells a lot of its products and services to small and midsize firms, recently founded an online network to source more of its business needs from such companies in the U.S. Sixteen other companies, including Caterpillar, Dell and AMD, are taking part. Since the project, called Supplier Connection, went live in March, the companies have booked tens of millions of dollars in new business from small firms. This has an exponential growth effect. A recent study by the Center for an Urban Future found that most small businesses that became suppliers to multinationals saw their employment go up, on average, 164% within two years. For the large firms, it's just smart business; many of the small and medium-size enterprises they fuel will undoubtedly become customers at some point. RULE NO. 5 Local Leaders Must Step Up Localnomics has great potential. But how much can governments do to nurture local economies? And how much should they do? Economists on both sides of the political spectrum have begun to argue that we need to rethink laissez-faire trade policies when we are up against state-run capitalist systems in places like China, which openly gives preference to homegrown firms and limits foreign capital even as it exports massive amounts of cheap goods. Groups like the Council on Foreign Relations and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation agree that the U.S. needs to get more aggressive about pursuing trade violations and punishing violators. Some economists call for sanctions or temporary tariffs. There's even a push in some quarters for the U.S. to shed its Alan Greenspan--era taboo on economic planning. "Manufacturing is thriving in China, Germany, Sweden and Singapore only because their governments set up specific vocational institutes to prepare workers for new industries," wrote Kishore Mahbubani, head of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, in a Financial Times op-ed. "China has rapidly overtaken the U.S. in green technology because of a coordinated national response, not because Chinese businesses alone invested in green technology." In the U.S., industrial policy remains a third-rail notion. (See what happens if you mention Solyndra.) And developing policies to support localnomics is tricky, as many factors that support it--currency, oil prices and even labor rates--can change quickly. In just the past couple of months, manufacturing in the U.S. has begun to soften a bit as Europe and emerging markets slow down. There's a risk of pitting state against state and city against city in a battle for short-term gains that can easily become a race to the bottom. Caterpillar decided to put a new factory in Texas because of, according to a spokesman, "port access, proximity to supply base and a more positive business climate." A good chunk of that last factor has to do with superlow tax rates and nonunion labor. But states that try to outdo one another on tax cuts may eventually undermine infrastructure and services needed to fuel longer-term growth. And localnomics doesn't mean the pressure on labor ends. Caterpillar creates lots of jobs, but even as profits and revenue rise, the company is seeking worker concessions and is embroiled in union skirmishes. Yet many economists continue to believe that localnomics is America's best hope for a real recovery. The McKinsey Global Institute recently published research noting that a large portion of the difference in economic growth between the U.S. and Europe is due to America's more vibrant cities and regional centers of growth, rather than just a few large capitals that generate most of the nation's wealth.br /> So count on cities to become more aggressive about protecting their economic future. Witness how Californian communities like San Bernardino and Stockton, driven to bankruptcy by mass foreclosures and frustrated by banks' reluctance to renegotiate mortgages, have announced plans to seize loans on underwater homes and forcibly restructure them. Or how Ohio and Tennessee are making sizable commitments to attract high-tech research institutions. Or how Seattle and Philadelphia are cementing niches in the global clean-tech arena. All these initiatives represent a bracing response to gridlocked politics as usual in Washington. And they also add up to local-centric approaches that may someday take us beyond the slow growth of a 2% economy. TO READ MORE BY RANA FOROOHAR, GO TO  time.com/foroohar Print li class="email" sizcache="5307" sizset="0"> Email   .......HUMANITY'S ETERNAL GRATITUDE... There are 0 additional comments.   Send your news items to be posted to news@prajapati-samaj.ca.