What can Americans create that the rest of the world buys?

Apparently they don't matriculate, but rather, come here, get edumacated, and then peace out (or get forced out).

 

This picture is an alcatel-lucent piece of equipment. Alcatel is a french company. Also Huawei, a chinese company, is being very disruptive in this space. They pretty much own the transmission equipment space now and putting a lot of pricing pressure in other areas. Nortel essentially went of of business because of Huawei.

 

There is no shortage of highly skilled jobs. The unemployment for software Engineers in Austin is less than 1 percent. There issue for Americans that that there are less jobs where you can get paid screwing in a bolt or puting things in a box. People in developing worlds get paid 200-300 dollars a month putting together iphones. We aren't getting those jobs back.

 

That too. Unlike what the pro-hemp / mar1juana crowd advocates I don't think hemp is a miracle plant but id does have a lot of value and its ridiculous that our drug policy prevents it from being grown.

Leaving aside hemp there are a lot of other ways to get diesel other than dead dinosaurs.

 

The unemployment rate for software eng was 5.3%

 

$200-$300 is a very good salary for many of these people. But you are right, we won't be getting these jobs back. Its better to manufacture them overseas then to have to pay higher costs here.

Its not easy to produce something other countries will buy when the other countries are not so materialistic.

 

debt

 

Best education does not matter if our culture promotes leisure over work. Difference between the average American and the average Foreigner is that one is coddled with luxuries and materialistic pleasure-seeking ideology, and the other... these luxuries aren't obtainable even if they wanted to.

 

p*rn?

 

Not in Austin. I've been talking to a bunch of recruiters and they have to relo a lot of people because they can't find anyone in Austin.

 

unfortunately this is true, the only thing that can happen is lowering the standard of living. but hey, investment in education is killing the country through debt right?

 

So OP's question is really aiming at ID US's competitive advantage.

The US is way more innovative than most other countries in the world, though the patent system is in need for an overhaul. But put things in perspective, the US has a far better engine to drive innovations than most other countries including China. Obama's increase of USPTO budget and pending patent system reform is a good start. We just sold China a fleet of Boeing airplanes, didn't we.

Then the service sector, US is light year ahead of emerging countries like China. Service exporting is an area the US has been trying to push open for some years. While China and other emerging economy is exporting goods to the US, US naturally wants to export the service sector to those countries. You will see more linkages between the two in upcoming international agreements.

There is also the continual effort from the US in IP rights enforcement under existing international agreements. This is also critical to protect US competitive advantages.

Like some posters pointed out, the low value added jobs are gone for good. The US has to focus on what it does the best. And the state of the current economy didn't just happen overnight. The last thing we want is shortsighted
protecionist's policy while leaving larger issues like education, spending unsolved.

 

US high school education measured by performance is ranked lowest among OECD countries according to the Economist.

 

Fixed.

 

How is that a "problem"? Would you rather we be doing the manual labor for 5 cents an hour while someone overseas is swimming in money profiting off us?

 

5 cents an hour beats 0 cents an hour.

 

.. duplicate

 

forget it.

 

There are plenty of minimum wage jobs that nobody wants to take. If people were willing to make minimum wage to manufacture stuff without benefits, we would have much more manufacturing jobs in the US. Like I said before in this thread, nobody is going to make 30-60K a year screw in a bolt like the old days. The free market took care of that.