Making Money at Home: A New American Opportunity
Over the last several decades the position of the American worker in global labor markets has generally worsened as the Soviet Bloc countries, China, and India have led the rest of the world in consolidating a world economy based on capitalism and markets. Professor Richard Freeman of Harvard University points out that this new arrangement, placing the entire world community on the same economic footing, immensely increases (essentially doubles) the world-wide labor pool with which Americans have to compete.This huge pool of competitors coupled with the fact that current high levels of immigration bring laborers into the market who work for less, means that generally wages tend to be decreasing for American laborers and a greater pressure is created for entrepreneurial and other sources of work that may involve staying at home and working for one’s self rather than being an employee in someone’s money-making organization.All of us, even the most aware, are constantly underestimating the size, scope, intricacy, and the importance of the Internet. America has been in a slow-moving crisis now for some time over how to create jobs and compete for income with workers in less developed countries. The internet offers a new alternative, one that involves working at home as an independent.The issue is about how to compete in the marketplace and the internet is the most astonishing worldwide marketplace the world has ever known. As such it offers America and Americans a solution to the worker competition problem that we are just beginning to discover. Thousands of people each day are turning to the internet as a place to find income. However, training is hard to find and working at home can be very isolating. It is something like starting to dig a coal mine at midnight. Among the unschooled it is not certain that the internet is able to provide. Certainly it is not able in a simple, easy, like falling out of bed kind of way.As in most areas of manufacturing where foreign companies gain in the competition because of cheap labor, cheaper raw materials costs, access to untapped resources, and local government subsidies, but American companies are able to hold their own because of ability to increase efficiency, be innovative, and increase mechanization, so are Americans able to remain viable competitors on the overall level by using the internet. But they have to learn and work hard.Americans have the freedom and flexibility to come up with new solutions and find new sources of income as technology and culture develops. It’s certainly not time to throw up our hands and give up. New problems may be created for America as a result of a growing unification of the world economy but we must not forget that we are at the very center of this world economy and in this position, we have immense opportunities to invent and create
