Two Articles Everybody Should Read!

A couple of articles I think you should read!  Neither of these pieces will make you a dime today but both are important in my opinion as I think they go a long way towards laying bare some of the major problems in both our economy in the country today.  Both are too long for me to put on the blog.  I'll give you the main thesis as an excerpt below but you need to read the articles to get the full flavor.   

The first from the New York Times  discusses how the US lost out on iPhone work.  What this says about American economic competitiveness versus Asia is disconcerting. 

"When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for dinner in California last February, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president.  But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States? Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas. Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.  Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.  The president’s question touched upon a central conviction at Apple. It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products......."

The second article deals with the new American divide.  It is a Saturday essay in the opinion section of the Wall Street Journal.  In an essay entitled  The New American Divide, author Charles Murray discusses how the "American Dream" seems to have gone away as the working class falls further away from institutions like marriage and religion and the upper class becomes more isolated.   While I'm not sure how new the divide between American social classes is and I'm not sure that the article {which is a preview of a book the author has written on the same subject} covers all these bases, I do think he hits on some major themes that on a societal basis are hurting us.  An excerpt that basically states his thesis:

"When Americans used to brag about "the American way of life"—a phrase still in common use in 1960—they were talking about a civic culture that swept an extremely large proportion of Americans of all classes into its embrace. It was a culture encompassing shared experiences of daily life and shared assumptions about central American values involving marriage, honesty, hard work and religiosity.

Over the past 50 years, that common civic culture has unraveled. We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America's core cultural institutions."

At any rate go read these articles.  Like I said they won't make you any money in the markets today but they should at least get you thinking.