China and India Are Beating Us At Our Own Game

John Doggett, senior lecturer in management, McCombs School of Business, The University of Texas at Austin, warns us to be careful what we wish for and not to make assumptions. His history lesson explains that after WWII, much of Europe and Asias infrastructure and industrial production capacity was destroyed. For a short time after, the U.S. was the only source for manufacturing. For the next 50 years, we assumed that developing countries would always be poor struggling economies, incapable of producing innovative products that could compete with us. We were wrong.
During the Cold War, we evangelized about capitalism and free market economies. In the mid 80s, CNN and satellite communications made it easy for the rest of the world to see that our standard of living was better than communist or socialist countries. We are in a race with countries that have bought into our value system and theyre playing by our rule book at a time when were tearing our rule book up.