Why do non-Western elites send their kids to Western countries for university educations?
> increasingly not alternative ways of competing either like creativity, influence or equality.
Which non-Western countries are competing on creativity?
So that they can plug themselves and their kids into massive, powerful, prosperous, global alumni networks.
They aren't, that's the point. Countries like China, Japan and South Korea are very good at pulling everyone in the same direction by following rules, having hierarchies, exchanging favors, working long hours, handing out punishments and whatnot. Far better than any western country could because we aren't at that point in time (and maybe Japan isn't now either). What they end up lacking is things like creativity. The problem is that western countries are also increasingly lacking opportunities to exercise creativity. There is few ways these days to in good faith drop out of school and crash on someones couch to do something else you rather want. Which has to some extent been the foundation of new industries.
Elites. We have the best education for elites. Not for everyone, which is a large part of the problem.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_...
Even among high schools and prep schools the nation-wide US average might be mediocre in public schools but when it comes to the higher-end private schools the US is still easily #1
https://www.prepreview.com/ranking/world/high-school-ranking...
That's a whole different conversation.
As I see it, Asian economies like India, China, Japan, South Korea offer a reasonable competition to Western economies today.
1. Samsung is a very viable competitor to Apple in hand held + wearables creative space.
2. Indian fin-tech solutions IMO today are some of the best in the world. All I need is a phone to shop for things (from buying a car to paying for parking) and have not used a credit/debit card for a year now (I live in India). Same in Indian edu-tech space. A lot of kids have quit school and are learning at home. Full time. I have not seen this happen anywhere before.
3. Toyota's are way more reliable than BMW's, Audi's and Ford's.
4. TSMC vs Intel is another good example.
I foresee a lot of innovation happening in Asia right now to go global in this and next decade.
Perhaps there is no such thing as a "knowledge" economy. At least not in a mass sense. Maybe instead the design knowledge which will drive automation is derivable from only a fraction of the population. That is only a small fraction of the population is capable or necessary for producing this knowledge. Perhpas the Utopia in which every child achieves a doctorate in engineering, medicine, etc was just a fantasy.
Perhaps the people who most perpetrated this story were motivated to. Because they were either complicit in the dismantling of the West's lower middle class economy or perhaps because they were apologists of untrestrained "free markets" and they needed a way to square their dogma without seeming cruel.
Perhaps the consequences of globalization minus the dogmatic fantasy of "everyone will be educated into being einstein" left the nagging uncomfortable suspicion that growth had its limits and someday we would have to admit that the only answer to making sure an equitable portion of wealth made its way into everyone's pockets wasn't an endless growth, every mom blasting their womb with Bach, an STM on every crib nerdocracy but instead gasp dare I say it? Redistribution!?
This is the key difference between the two ideologies. One side believes equity should be distributed equally regardless of achievement, the other believes equity distribution is directly correlated to productive measures of success.
"From those with the greatest ability, to those with the greatest need."
I'm not sure this is true. I think a lot of people including economics professors like to consider themselves fairly humanistic. And I think the idea of a mass of people permanently living near or below poverty bothers them.
And I think they take it somewhat for granted that their favorite economic theory has in our recent past effectively provided a middle class standard of living for many people. But when we start talking about dismantling the mechanisms which have created the large middle class and how it could decrease quality of life and increase poverty, they don't offer an honest assessment based on the fundamentals of their theory. That would be to say, "well yes such changes may induce pverty here."
Instead there is kind of a shrug. We'll become a service economy, nevermind making a comparison of the quality of the new service jobs against those being transplanted.
Or we'll become a knowledge economy, the great brain of global capital. Again never really contending with the question of whether that is even possible.
This allows them in my opinion to advocate politicies which harm people whilst shrugging off any guilt because instinctively they know to willfully empoverish people is wrong. It is this dishonesty that bothers me.
My gripe is not with those advocating against redistribution. Though my personal politics are for a mass ownership of property in some regard. My gripe is with people who have setup what might be a fiction (maybe it could be real too) as the answer to making choices which create suffering. And then for that image to have become a dogma we all expected to accept without questioning its basis in reality.
I'm willing to accept that I could be wrong. But I come from a working class background. I've known a lot of working class people over the years and the idea that most or even many of them are going to pivot into IT or what have you is just nonsense. The vast majority have pivoted into low paid service work without much social insurance of any kind.