Nuff Said: 'US-Sino Currency Rap Battle'

An IPE@UNC homie name checks yours truly and points us in the direction of--I kid you not--the "US-Sino Currency Rap Battle." It's actually very entertaining if I have a quibble here and there. F'rinstance:

• Uncle Sam goes from a beggar to more than holding his own against a panda (representing China) by the clip's end--not quite consistent;
• The chorus stresses interdependence a bit too much for my tastes;
• Since the scriptwriters are billing this as a primer on the upcoming G-20 summit, shouldn't there be some talk about Germany as well as others complaining about US actions like Brazil?
• Why is "Timmy G" being sent by Obama to rat-ta-tat-tat his gat at PRC currency miscreants? He doesn't strike me as very tough since he's continually refused to designate China a currency manipulator. Also, his most memorable China incident was being laughed off at PKU when asked whether the PRC's dollar holdings were safe;
• The animators missed this great opportunity to show Bernanke helicopter dropping wads of cash around the globe (please make this the subject of your next video feature!)
• It's not really the use of the dollar as a vehicle currency but rather it's use as a reserve currency that buoys it. For the difference between a flow (less important) and a stock (more important) concept in foreign exchange, see a previous post.
  

Anyway, those are minor nitpicks. More of this! (And yes, they probably should just cut the crap and start fighting already. We're all likely better off that way instead of sticking with a suboptimal current situation.)

Good Tunes: The Political Economy of Philip Glass

It shouldn't surprise anybody that I am an avid Philip Glass fan. While I generally disdain low American strip mall, subprime, and SUV culture, his work is of a higher standard. Known almost to all, Glass is arguably the finest living American composer. At a time when popular awareness of classical music is approaching nil, he bravely carries the torch. Of course, it helps his international reputation that Glass bashes widespread American atrocities such as the invasion of Iraq in the name of freedom and growth. (It may sound funny but the artistic reputation of Yanks who enjoy bashing their own is generally higher abroad.) In particular, I enjoyed his play Waiting for the Barbarians in which he dwells on the themes of state-sponsored torture and repression.

While listening to yet another addition to his extensive discography featuring the Glass Chamber Players fronted by his girlfriend Wendy Sutter, I was taken by the informative liner notes that suggest American cultural depravity and the compositional flourishes of Glass may be related after all. As it turns out, Philip Glass's father became an initially reluctant listener to modern composers such as Arnold Schoenberg, Bela Bartok, and Dmitri Shostakovich (who I do listen to, by the way). Ben Glass had trouble selling their records at his music store. To investigate why, he took these records home:

In another story, Glass would tell of the “return privilege” which was part of the record industry in which retailers were allowed to return a certain percentage of the records if they were damaged. In order to exercise this privilege, Philip and his brother Marty would go down into the basement and break the records that had not sold. This was the first job that Philip Glass ever held in the music industry.

Such an action was a logical answer to a problem: what to do with the records that didn’t sell? Being a very practical guy, as we saw with the evolution of his businesses, Ben Glass had another idea. He would take the records home and listen to them to try to find out why people weren’t buying them. It just so happens that the music which was not selling was classical and 20th century chamber music by composers like Schoenberg, Shostakovich, and Bartok. It was in this way that the Glass home record collection of 78s grew and that a very big part of Philip Glass’ artistic sensibilities were first cultivated. The soundtrack of Philip Glass’ youth had been created.

It is important to the history of music is that Philip Glass spent time as a young person at home with his father listening to chamber music records. Ben Glass was not an educated musician, but he was a music lover in best sense. In the process of listening to these records to “find out what was wrong with them,” he became a sophisticated listener and developed a taste for chamber music. Father Glass would bring Philip in to the room and simply say to the future composer, “Here kid, listen to this.” Years later, after his father’s death, Glass composed his first concert-work as a mature composer, his Violin Concerto No.1 in 1987. He composed it as a piece that he hoped his father would have liked in the tradition of the great concertos by such composers as Mendelssohn, Sibelius, and Tchaikovsky concertos.

And so the young Philip Glass was well on his way to becoming what he is today. Not bad for a onetime taxi driver. It's strange but true: American cultural ignoramuses defined the formative years of Philip Glass. I guess that's something to be thankful for as we contemplate the idiosyncrasies of Einstein at the Beach.

The Knowledge Worker Myth vs Blue Collar Reality

Never let it be said that there's no art to blogging. Alike in the offline world, there are talented folks who know how to weave a compelling narrative out of a mundane story, and there are those who weave a mundane narrative out of a compelling story. Today, I will of course try for the former--as I always do ;-) IMHO, something that separates a good blogger from a pedestrian one is an eye for something everyone else misses...

Once more demonstrating that you don't have to look far for IPE-relevant material, I came across this featured story on Yahoo!'s front page yesterday. There it was staring me in the face: a pretty damning indictment of what I've been taught all my life. Like me, you probably grew up in a generation that disdained blue collar work. That is, work which actually involves physical exertion and being good with one's hands has been frowned upon. It is not that these biases were made up on our own; our parents also had a role in drumming in the message that "manual labour" was something dirty. Hence, many of you are also of a generation told that lawyers, bankers, businessmen, and the like had it made. The white collar life was supposed to promise the land of milk and honey.

Certainly, academia has had an interest in propagating this story since it provides fodder for ensuring a steady stream of tuition-paying students in law, commerce, and business. Various American commentators like former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan have constructed an entire narrative out of "knowledge workers." In recent times, that has meant training to be a software engineer or some other lofty position that makes the most of conceptualizing abstract ideas and similarly high-faluting rhetoric. The truth, though, is much less compelling. Take America (please). Not only are there scores of unemployed college graduates there, but wages of college graduates have been on a downward trend since 2000. So much for the college myth.

The aforementioned Reuters article rubs it in further by pointing out that, actually, the skills which are most in demand worldwide are not those requiring fancy college degrees but fairly "mundane" blue-collar certification:

Workers with specialized skills like electricians, carpenters and welders are in critically short supply in many large economies, a shortfall that marks another obstacle to the global economic recovery, a research paper by Manpower Inc (MAN.N) concludes. "It becomes a real choke-point in future economic growth," Manpower Chief Executive Jeff Joerres said. "We believe strongly this is really an issue in the labor market."

The global staffing and employment services company says employers, governments and trade groups need to collaborate on strategic migration policies that can alleviate such worker shortages. Skilled work is usually specific to a given location: the work cannot move, so the workers have to.

The shortage of skilled workers is the No. 1 or No. 2 hiring challenge in six of the 10 biggest economies, Manpower found in a recent survey of 35,000 employers. Skilled trades were the top area of shortage in 10 of 17 European countries, according to the survey.

While the short-term way to address to shortages is to embrace migration, the long-term solution is to change attitudes toward skilled trades, Manpower argues. Since the 1970s, parents have been told that a university degree -- and the entry it affords into the so-called knowledge economy -- was the only track to a financially secure profession. But all of the skilled trades offer a career path with an almost assured income, Joerres said, and make it possible to open one's own business.

In the United States, recession and persistent high unemployment may lead parents and young people entering the workforce to reconsider their options. The skilled trades category also includes jobs like bricklayers, cabinet makers, plumbers and butchers, jobs that typically require a specialist's certification.

Older, experienced workers are retiring and their younger replacements often do not have the right training because their schools are out of touch with modern business needs. Also contributing to the shortage is social stigma attached to such work, Manpower argues in its paper published on Wednesday.

A poll of 15-year-olds by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found only one in 10 American teenagers see themselves in a blue-collar job at age 30. The proportion was even lower in Japan. Education could address that stigma. Students should be reminded that blue-collar work can be lucrative: skilled plumbers can make upwards of $75,000 a year, Manpower argues. Overall, Manpower's fifth annual talent shortage survey found 31 percent of employers worldwide are having difficulty filling positions due to the lack of suitable workers available in their markets, up one percentage point over last year...

And there's also the problem of developed countries reluctance to accept more migrants despite a lack of workers with the requisite skills:

Examples of successful, targeted migration include an Ohio shipbuilder that brought in experienced workers from Mexico and Croatia, and a French metal-parts maker that hired Manpower to find welders in Poland.

Obstacles to such migration include differing standards for certification in skilled trades, as well as political barriers to immigration, which remains an "emotive" subject in many countries, Manpower's CEO said. Japanese employers, for example, have difficulty attracting skilled workers. Sweden, on the other hand, is innovative and aggressive about strategic migration, for example by removing obstacles to workers being recertified in their specialty, Joerres said.

Coming from a country that is a large sender of migrants, I myself work on these issues of international certification and similar qualifications. In the end, all I ask is that we be allowed to compete on a level playing field despite obvious disadvantages of relative poverty and the need to traverse often vast distances away from hearth and home. For obvious reasons, though, many of those in the West would rather not extend the opportunity to foreigners to compete for qualifications on similar terms. I prefer to think that hard work will help me overcome prejudices in a white man's world.

At any rate, do read the Manpower publication Strategic Migration - A Short-Term Solution to the Skilled Trades Shortage discussed in the article above as it is quite illuminating, Manpower certainly knows its business as it is the second largest staffing company in the world. While lifting limits on migration in order to combat global slowdown is certainly of interest to me, the fact that much-maligned blue collar work is actually what's in short supply should be a wake-up call to others. Perhaps higher education is a fraud foisted on me that I've helped perpetuate. It's not a comforting thought, but hey, sometimes the truth hurts but needs to be told.

* * *
On my walk home, I usually pass Priscilla: Queen of the Desert, Dirty Dancing, and Legally Blonde. Obviously, the Brits are fond of making musicals out of blockbuster movies. Guess what's opening soon in London's theatre district? I kid you not: Flashdance: The Musical [!] Critics have always disparaged this movie and its plot that beggars belief. IMDB's plot summary sums it up nicely:

Alex Owens is a female dynamo: steel worker by day, exotic dancer by night. Her dream is to get into a real dance company, though, and with encouragement from her boss/boyfriend, she may get her chance. The city of Pittsburgh co-stars. What a feeling!

OK, so I too thought Flashdance was more of a vehicle for the 80s soundtrack than the other way around. The new musical is in the same vein: more a platform for catchy 80s songs than plot-driven drama. Still, it begs the question: if a musical featuring a hackneyed tale about a welder can be made into a London musical, what is there stopping blue collar trades from being made "glamorous" as well? It's a task of changing perceptions that begins with parents who influence their offspring's career choices. I personally believe that unemployment is unglamorous, so the blue collar stigma is undeserved.

Ultimately, perhaps it's those of us with degrees in higher education who are the real dummies. Moreover, I suspect this world would be a much better place if there were more welders than, say, investment bankers--whether they choose to be exotic dancers at night or otherwise. Young son or daughter, in the immortal words of, er, Irene Cara, take your passion...and make it happen.

UPDATE: Kindred over at IPE@UNC suggests that I was mistaken over a "few facts" about US income trends. Now Kindred's a good kid, but he is wet behind the ears as he tends to put words in my mouth and gets embarrassed for it. Anyway, I decided to look up the numbers for myself instead of relying on other's charts. Below are the figures for US income for those 25 and up for the years 2000 to 2008 from US Census Bureau tables P-16 and P-18. It doesn't matter whether it's the mean or the median or if you're male or female; real annual income has been falling there since 2000. It doesn't matter either if you're a college graduate or have a higher educational attainment [click to enlarge image]:

I guess the furriner is more familiar with US stats than the American. Also at grad school, you are taught not to compare apples and oranges, but he does so by quoting another data series and naively suggesting differences have something to do with using "mean" and not "median" data. The table above should shelve that schoolboy howler (and I even use the same data series!) Maybe Kindred should visit Singapore for I suspect the educational standard there isn't declining as markedly as it is in America. R-E-A-D-I-N-G comprehension suggests this post is about college prospects post-(US led) financial crisis, so there you go with regard to time frames. Oh well, it's good he at least recognizes income there isn't rising unlike before. As an educator, I find patience with the recalcitrant to be a virtue. Lastly, the point Manpower makes is that there are technical and vocational degrees that stand you a good chance of landing a job while there are many college degrees that don't. Again for the S-L-O-W learner, it's not college vs. non-college but in-demand technical or vocational degree vs. not-in-demand college degree. And don't get me started on this being a worldwide survey instead of another boringly parochial American one.

You have to wake up pretty early in the morning to put one over ol' Emmanuel, Wizened IPE Buzzard ;-)

The Political Economy of Eurovision Song Contest

Appropriately given the EU's current situation, I am reading leading institutional scholar Johan Olsen's Europe in Search of Political Order. Having had the pleasure of meeting him, I am most impressed by this volume. While reading this book, I recently turned on the TV and saw the 55th staging of the strange spectacle known as the Eurovision Song Contest. If you are unfamiliar with Eurovision, it is nearly exactly what its title suggests--a song competition hosted by European countries. In short, it's Europe's Got Talent long before Simon Cowell arrived on the scene. (And, critics would say that many entrants are singularly lacking talent.) Now, what does Eurovision have to do with the search for political order in Europe, you ask? In its own odd way, Eurovision has been a platform for establishing a pan-European identity in the wider integration project. It is a way of creating "we-feeling." As Professor Olsen so aptly puts it:

The level of institutionalization and integration increases as the constitutive units...develop a common public space, civic society and institutions able to educate and socialize individuals into informed citizens with a shared political identity and culture (p. 96).

In a nutshell, this is what Eurovision tries to do. While most Eurovision acts are never to be heard from again, Eurovision has also spawned winners alike world-famous ABBA and Celine Dion. Yes, you may quibble endlessly about the tackiness of it all--the MTV wannabe productions and faithful copping of Anglo-Saxon pop conventions are evident to everybody. Consider, however, that this banality is a means of socializing citizens in European countries--and Europe's neighbouring countries--in the ways of capitalist liberal democracy.

While some say that the football field now represents the (infinitely preferable) arena for competition for European nations than the battlefield, I have recently pointed out that dubious applications of EU migration law to the sporting arena have diluted the identity of national clubs. For all its flaws, Eurovision might be a more honest vision of regional competition that invokes the European identity--more so than the Champions League or even the European Football Championship.

What struck me this year were the following:

1. On a not-so-positive note, many European countries chose not to send entrants to Oslo, the site of this year's competition, because of budgetary constraints. Given sizeable budget deficits in any number of European countries, making catchy MTV-style videos as well as flying, feeding, accommodating, and outfitting contestants is apparently hard to justify:

The Czech Republic, Montenegro, Andorra and Hungary have snubbed this year's 55th competition in Oslo because of cash cuts, organisers admitted. Svante Stockselius, executive supervisor of Eurovision, said: "The economic crisis is affecting us. We have fewer countries competing and they all withdrew for the same reason - cuts."

2. On a more positive note, Turkey finished second in the competition with the entry embedded above. In 2003, it won the whole shebang. IMHO, it is far superior to the German entry that ultimately won. Speaking of which, these two countries figure large into the question of whether Turkey will be allowed to join the EU. Together with France (and to a lesser extent Austria), Germany has long been at the forefront of hindering Turkey's membership prospects--especially over democracy, human rights, and so on and so forth. Hence the notion of a downgraded "privileged partnership" that is being peddled to Turkey instead of full EU membership. Although Israel of all countries has won Eurovision before (even Andorra and Morocco have participated), Turkey's continued participation and strong performances in this event bear notice. If a country can so slavishly copy European throwaway culture, why is there so much skepticism that it cannot blend in if it joined the EU?

Moving back to the unavoidable realm of football, Turkish club Galatasaray has even been a UEFA Cup winner. If you can be "champions" of Europe in song and sport, then there is no sensible reason to be denied membership in the European Union, is there? As MaNga sings above in lyrics that may perhaps apply to Turkey's application for EU accession:

I can see that this could be fate
I can love you more than they hate
Doesn't matter who they will blame
We can beat them at their own game

Whether the game is singing or football, Turkey has indeed demonstrated Europeanization by beating them at their own game. I may love Eurovision more for the ideal it represents than entertainment value, but there are lessons for integration here that we should all take heed of. We could be the same / No matter what they say.

3. Lastly, speaking of the political economy of Eurovision, it's no surprise certain judges didn't give the Turkish entry any points and other voting patterns continuing:

MaNga received 12 points from France, Croatia and Azerbaijan and 10 points from England, Macedonia, Bulgaria and Germany. They were not given points from Greece or Greek Cyprus...

As in earlier years, regional blocks played a huge role in attributing points: Greece gave the maximum of 12 points to Cyprus who returned the favor; Serbia gave its points to Bosnia-Herzegovina, while Belarus' top marks went to Russia.

Since judges and audiences cannot vote for their nation's entry, Eurovision has been used to sort out national loyalties and rivalries in the European context. (Obviously, the Greeks aren't too fond of the Turks given their past run-ins over Cyprus.) Some researchers at Oxford have even used network and cluster analysis to this effect [!] Interesting stuff.