I’m not really a “car guy,” so this is a strange
topic for this blog (except insofar as anything we do with our money is
intensely theological). But the experience of buying one this past week got me
researching some things that I don’t normally.
Because my wife and I bought our 2010 Honda Insight used, the
nationality of its make isn’t as relevant to the American economy except that
we supported a dealership (Nissan) that employs American salespeople,
accountants, and so on. And I guess, in some ambiguous way, we’re sending a
message that we, as American consumers, prefer a car with higher fuel
efficiency and a smaller carbon footprint.
While cars are a bit outside my comfort zone, the
point I want to make here is actually fairly simple and is at least obliquely
informed by my training in theology. I’m not so much commenting on the raw
economic data as the attitudes and assumptions that cause people to interpret
the data a certain way (something that we call “hermeneutics” in biblical study).
Moreover, because of the church world that I inhabit, I’ve become quick to
recognize it when self-proclaimed “traditionalists” are being anything but by
refusing to join a longstanding tradition (whether religious or economic) of
adapting to the world around them as it changes. And to make this simple point, I’ve chosen for
my foil, Clint Eastwood, of Republic National Convention notoriety. Specifically, I’m thinking back to that
inspiring and passionate Super Bowl ad for Chrysler in which he laid out the pervasive
but misinformed notion that to buy a car with an American label is to invest in
the American economy.
The problem with this (aside from its belligerently nationalistic
tone) is that, basically, there is no such thing as an American car, and there
hasn’t been for some time. Ford and Chevy send out parts for assembly all over
the world. Toyota builds cars in Indiana, Kentucky, and Texas, Honda in Ohio
and Alabama. Like them, Mazda is persistently trying to move more and more of
its labor wing to America to capitalize on the exchange rate. Many of these
cars are finally sold back in Japan with most of their labor dollars staying in
the US (the exact reverse of what so many complain is happening with “American”
products overseas). General Motors’ best known lines of SUVS are built in
Mexico, and when parts, jobs, and sales, have all been accounted for, cars.com
reports that “the most American-made car” is the Toyota Camry, followed closely
by the Honda Accord, both of which companies are neck and neck with Ford for
most American jobs created. You get the idea.
Of course, when politicians say they’re interested
in “bringing jobs back to Detroit,” I
assume they’re not unaware of how blurred the borders of auto-manufacturing
have become. What they seem not to grasp is that globalization has happened/is
happening and can’t be undone, ironically, due to the same “invisible hand” logic
that they claim will reverse it. Economic globalization, as I see it, is
nothing but the free market writ large across the Earth. Multinational
corporations have no loyalty to any symbolic state or arbitrary geographical
boundary. They will go wherever they can minimize costs and maximize revenues
with the least amount of political interference.
This is why it’s the attitudes and assumptions that
are the interesting part here, even when the raw data is straightforward to the
point of uninteresting. I’m guessing that Clint Eastwood’s simplistic notion
that an American label equals an American product is a holdover from post-WWII
thinking when our manufactures could essentially come from a self-contained
system of land, labor, and capital and then be exported as finished products to
the world abroad. Simply put, what made this an import-export market versus a
globalized market, was not that there was no spread of widgets and technologies
across the globe—obviously there was—but that there was still a satisfactory
(from the American’s standpoint) imbalance between nations, with high-end
products mostly flowing one direction and profits mostly the other.
Of course, globalization doesn’t happen overnight
(though it may seem like it), and America has been hiring out overseas for
decades. But even as we began using low-skill assembly overseas, we could still
maintain that this was basically how the world worked so long as the high-skill
employment, and with it, the primary economic benefit came home at the end of
the night. But as the education levels of those formerly “low-skill” peoples
rises, and they begin competing with “high-skill” Americans for jobs or, horror
of horrors, just starting competing companies of their own, there is a tipping
point where it no longer behooves us to believe that we’re still the world’s
designated manufacturers. We’re still welcome to tell ourselves that we are
over against all factual observation but only at the steep cost of failing to
learn where we now fit in a world that has changed.
My
simple contention is that it’s not patriotic to deny the facts and try to
regress back to the good ol’ days before globalization nor is it unpatriotic to
admit that the world just doesn’t work the way it did 60 years ago. In fact, it’s
quite the opposite for those of us who still need to figure out how to swim in
these new waters.
But that
brings me to another point: globalization is neither malicious nor benign. It
just is. What we do with it is up to us. At the popular level of discourse (when
mixed with political ideology), “globalization” is a word spoken, on the one
end, with a sort of bleeding heart giddiness as if all the world’s most
intractable social injustices are suddenly on the verge of solving themselves almost
providentially, and on the other end, its rarely spoken at all and only then with
much fear and trembling. But more dispassionate and thoughtful economists tend
to speak of it as something value neutral. In other words, globalization in and
of itself is neither good nor bad, it just is. That the industry of the give or
take 195 sovereign nations of the world is now sufficiently interdependent to
the point where, as Claude Smadje said it, “the resilience of the global
economy is only as strong as the weakest of its components,”[1] is,
I believe simply the raw data of where we are in history.
If that’s true, then Clint Eastwood has it exactly
backwards when he growls, “This country can’t be knocked down with one punch.
We get right back up again, and when we do, the world is gonna hear the roar of
our engines.” His tone seems to assume we’re in a sort of worldwide blood sport
for import-export supremacy. I’m reminded of a line I recently read from Asian
geopolitical commentator Kishore Mahbubani on Europe (read: the West), “According
to European theory and practice, which has been distilled from 19th-century
European history when several new European powers emerged, there should always
be rivalries and zero-sum competition among rising powers.”[2]
The impasse between this worldview and Mahbubani's derives from a fundamental tenant of global thinking, one that I fear Americans
will catch onto later rather than sooner. It's that this is not a "zero-sum competition." Success now goes to the best integrators rather than the best
competitors. The correct question is not, “How can we turn back
the clock, undo globalization, and get the drop on a certain export market?”
Rather, it’s “Where do we fit into a world that rewards integrators?”
Eastwood, with his jingoistic disposition shared by
far too many of our nationals, seems unlikely to make this paradigm shift. What’s
required of us now, if we want to “fit” somewhere in this new world, is not
just some decisions about what products to consume (though that hasn’t become
unimportant) but a more basic decision about what kind of identity we need to
dawn in this new epoch of human history.
[1]
Smadje, Claude, “The End of Complacency”, Foreign
Policy, winter 1998-99, p. 67.
[2]
Mahbubani, Kishore. Can Asian’s Think? (Singapore:
Marshall Cavendish, 2009), 125.
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