The size of the pool gets smaller and smaller, and the demand for those skills gets bigger and bigger, so you have more companies competing for a smaller and smaller group of talented people.

Yeah, sure. These grandiose predictions fail to take into account that the elites that run most large enterprises were badly stung by the minor talent shortage of the late 1990s, and will do everything possible to ensure they don’t get stung again. They won’t allow employees to hit them up for signing bonuses, flex time, liberal dress codes and other disruptive trends that hurt ROI and weaken command and control.

There are three things they will do to ensure the talent shortage predicted by  demographic studies will not be allowed to occur:

1. Exporting Jobs : Software development work exported by US companies last year totaled $8B, and help-desk support outsourced is probably higher than that, growing at 20% per year. Add in other sectors and that’s a ton of skilled jobs (probably at least ten million) taken from Americans. As the baby bust rolls through, expect this give-away to multiply many-fold.
2. Increasing Retirement Age : Thanks to the elimination of the middle class in America by Bush and previous administrations hell bent on privatizing everything, curtailing social services, and allowing public infrastructure to fall into chaos and disrepair, fewer and fewer Americans can afford to retire at the age they used to. And thanks to fiscal mismanagement and corporate greed, many Americans’ retirement funds have been decimated anyway. Add fifteen years to the average retirement age and the talent shortage quickly turns into a talent glut.
3. Tapping the Vast Pool of Under-Employed : If the above two tricks don’t do the job, companies can always start to move Americans, the majority of whom describe themselves as under-employed, out of the abysmal temporary, part-time and contract jobs they’ve been doing through the Bush recession, into more suitable jobs. So if anyone will be facing a ‘talent shortage’, it will be McDonalds and WalMart. And those jobs can always be filled by desperate moonlighters.

In combination, these three shifts will more than offset the demand increase caused by the retirement of baby boomers and the movement of the post-baby boom ‘bust’ generation into business’ senior ranks. They will ensure the perpetuation of centuries of wage slavery, the demoralization of more generations of workers in largely meaningless, underpaid jobs, and the continued subjugation of many bright and competent people by a small number of moneyed and incompetent managers, most of whom either inherited their wealth and position or bought it by virtue of enrolment in ivy league colleges and subsequent employment by companies currying favour with their privileged fathers.

In short, American economics stacks the deck against new entrepreneurs, against young people and old people with ambition and ideas, and against a more egalitarian working world. True talent, the ability to run a healthy business that puts people and the environment ahead of short term profit, will continue to be scarce in the executive suites of major corporations.The reality that America is not the land of unlimited opportunity, but rather a land where cartels of privilege prevail and consolidate their staggering wealth and power by working the political and economic engines to entrench their dynasties, will be hard for Americans to face up to. But ending this tyranny is the only way out. We can’t hope or expect a ‘talent shortage’ to do the job for us.

Postscript: Image above from VisionFragments – see right sidebar.

In fact he argues the opposite: that constitutional and economic liberalism (rule of law, separation of church and state, earned and reasonably distributed wealth, as calculated by the Gini index, defensible civil liberties and especially balance of power) are preconditions for the success of democracy. Even worse, he demonstrates that countries whose wealth is natural (the oil states especially) are disadvantaged in the search for democracy, since such wealth removes the urgency to generate and distribute earned wealth (wealth generated by labour, innovation and human productivity), and worsens the temptation for autocrats to hoard power and buy off opponents.

Zakaria backs up his claims with examples from all over the world, where premature political democratization, in the absence of constitutional and economic liberalism, has been astonishingly unsuccessful and short-lived, and where dictatorships like Singapore with liberal constitutional and economic institutions thrive.

He has harsh words for America, the

advocate of unrestrained democracy abroad. What is distinctive about the American system is not how democratic it is but rather how undemocratic it is, placing as it does multiple constraints on elected majorities. The Bill of Rights is a list of things the government may not do regardless of the wishes of the majority. The Supreme Court is headed by nine unelected men and women with life tenure. The US Senate is the most unrepresentative upper house in the world. The less formal constraints, however, that are the inner stuffing of liberal democracy are disappearing. They are all threatened by a democratic ideology that judges every idea and institution by one simple test: Is power as widely dispersed as it can be? Congress has become more responsive, more democratic, and more dysfunctional body. Or consider America’s political parties. They serve merely as vessels to be filled with the public’s taste of the moment. Americas professions have lost their prestige and public purpose, becoming anxious hucksters. The forces that guided domocracy are quickly being eroded.

I wrote before about Zakaria’s prediction that democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq will take generations to evolve successfully, and of the utter failure throughout history of any foreign occupying power to introduce constitutional and economic liberalism in an occupied territory. These states will therefore inevitably and violently decline into brutal, and illiberal autocracies, religious or secular.

Zakaria cites some remarkable data about the slow pace of introduction of democracy, even in the countries where it has prevailed the longest. In the UK in 1832 less than 2% of the population could vote, rising slowly to 12% in 1884 and full suffrage only in 1930. In the US in 1824, a half-century after independence, only 5% of adults could vote. Women got suffrage there in 1920, and blacks in the South effectively only in the 1960s.

Predicted future democracies, where there is sufficient distributed GDP per capita and sufficient economic and constitutional liberalism to sustain it: Romania, Bulgaria, Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, Malaysia, Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia, and, if Bush keeps out of the way, Iran. Zakaria holds the US and the IMF responsible for the failure of democracy in Indonesia, where demands for hasty, premature economic and political reforms precipitated financial disaster and led to the downfall of a flawed but functioning constitutional liberal state, raising the risk of that country becoming another Islamist theocracy.

The problem in America, Zakaria claims, is now too much democracy. The American system has been subverted, he says, by the crippling of political parties and the filling of the power void by moneyed lobbyists and organized, single-issue fanatics. He cites the fact that government-hater Bush’s spending has risen 11% over Clinton’s, ignoring the increases in defense and security spending. He quotes Jonathan Rauch:

The American government has evolved into about what it will remain: A sprawling, largely self-organizing structure that is 10-20% under the control of politicians and voters and 80-90% under the control of countless thousands of interest groups (”mischiefs of faction”). This is the heart of America’s dilemma today, and the reason the American people believe they have no real control over government [and hence why participation in the political process has dropped precipitously].

I had not realized that the US government, unlike most Western governments whose spending is largely on social services and interest on debt, spends such a huge proportion of its budget on programs that are neither social nor defense, but rather subsidies to special interest groups. Zakaria claims this tyranny of minorities extends beyond economic interests, and, for example, explains why anti-Castro forces in swing states New Jersey and Florida have sustained sanctions against Cuba that the vast majority of Americans would prefer to see ended. He quotes George Stephanopolis on how the decline of the power of political parties has changed the political process:

There is no Democratic Party. If [a candidate] wants to run, he has to raise the money, get good publicity, and move up in the polls, which will get him more money and better press. What party elders think is irrelevant because there is no party anymore. Political parties have no real significance in America today. The party is, at most, a fund-raising vehicle for a telegenic candidate.

Zakaria also takes shots at the primary system (only 18% of eligible voters participate), and points out that, in contrast to the public’s disdain for democratic political institutions like Congress, they hold three institutions – the Supreme Court, the Fed, and the armed forces, all of them undemocratic – in high esteem, because, he says, Americans admire institutions that lead rather than follow.

While Zakaria has, in my view, an overly sentimental affection for the unelected power elites of the past, arguing that they were surprisingly responsible, open and even altruistic, you have to like his view on bloggers, at the end of the book:

In the world of journalism, the blog was hailed as the killer of the traditional media. In fact it has become something quite different. Far from replacing newspapers and magazines, the best blogs – and the best blogs are very clever – have become guides to them, pointing to unusual sources and commenting on familiar ones. They have become new mediators for the informed public, a new Tocquevillean elite.

And, Fareed, sometimes we even present some original ideas of our own.

Forget going oversees to fight in Bush’s infinite war against terrorism, the really heroic thing in this country is managing against so many odds to get yourself educated.

Life, each individual life and our collective life on the planet is a teleological game, it is not infinite, like Bush’s justice, it has an ending, and so the future you put your faith in is not, in fact, limitless; and given the catastrophic failure here and abroad of the Kyoto global warming accords, given our newfound post 9-11 imperialist exuberance, given the sagging of the world’s economy and the IMF-directed refusal to see any solutions beyond making poor people suffer even more than they always do in the hopes of reviving a market that only ever revives long enough to make the rich even richer, given the eagerness in Washington to explore new and tinier kinds of nuclear bombs, well, it’s sort of optimistic to believe it’s a supernova that’s going to get us, when it’s clear that what’s much more likely to get us, if we are got, is our present condition of living in a world run by miscreants while the people of the world have either no access to power or have access but have forgotten how to get it and why it is important to have it.

And this is what I think you people have gotten your education for.

You have presumably made a study of how important it is for the people – the people and not the oil plutocrats, the people and not the fantasists in right-wing think-tanks, the people and not the virulent lockstep gasbags of Sunday morning talk shows and editorial pages and all-Nazi all-the-time radio ranting marathons, the thinking people and not the crazy people, the rich and multivarious multicultural people and not the pale greyish-white cranky grim greedy people, the secular pluralist people and not the theocrats, the metaphorical imaginative expansive generous sensual rational people and not the sexual hysterics, the misogynists, Muslim and Christian and Jewish fundamentalists, the hard-working people and not the people whose only real exertion ever in their whole parasite lives has been the effort if takes to slash a trillion plus dollars in tax revenue and then stuff it in their already overfull pockets – whatever your degree, you have presumably read history and thought about justice and freedom and the relationship between ideas and action

… and you know how important it is for the sizable community of decent, sane, just, egalitarian people, comprising many minority communities, constituting if not a majority then a plurality, a substantial, smart, let’s-say-40-percent-plurality community, more than large enough in a pluralist democracy – which for the time being the United States still is – if it uses its brains and works together to wield decisive power …

… power for enfranchisement and economic as well as racial justice and gender justice and sexual political justice and environmental sanity and in the name of a real globalism, a real internationalism, a real solidarity with all the peoples of the world, to wield power infused with the knowledge that democracy is created not by military machines, not by MOAB bombs and smart bombs but by smart peaceable people, fed people, educated people; democracy is created by making an aggressive, determined and long-term effort at eradicating the real axis of evil: poverty, homelessness, no health care.

You have read and studied and thought and argued and you all know that it is important for the people to have power and now you must go out into the world and get it, snatch it back from where it lies, tangled in the bushes, and then use it well, for the community, for the common good. That’s the next bit of bravery we demand from you heroic people.