Barbara Ehrenreich's The Post-American World

For millennials, the question that looms in their minds is “will I have a job when I’m done with college?” In the past decade, job security has been questionable for college students because America has been moving nearly every part of production they can to cheaper countries. But is this necessarily a bad thing? Barbara Ehrenreich, in her article “Your Local News--Dateline Delhi,” certainly thinks so. She believes outsourcing will be the ultimate demise of America’s greatness. Fareed Zakaria focuses on globalization in his book The Post-American World, and how outsourcing is just one small component of it. He believes that globalization has been beneficial for the rest of the world, and how it will ultimately be beneficial for us too. Ehrenreich’s

Ehrenreich asks the question: “Whoops-weren’t we supposed to be the innovators?”(609). Is that because of outsourcing? Or is it because we’ve given other countries the tools to rise to our level? The US has been the center of innovation and research for years. We had Hollywood and Wall Street, Las Vegas and ______, but now it’s Bollywood and London, Macao and ______. The wealth is being redistributed, and the world is cashing in on it. But are we really falling behind? Zakaria doesn’t think so. He points out that “[i]n virtually every sector that advanced countries participate in, the US firms lead the world in productivity and profits”(619). The US’s exports still make up 9 percent of the world total, only dropping one percent from 10% in 1980. America still ranks first in innovation, second in the quality of research institutions, and China doesn’t come within thirty countries in any of these lists (Zakaria 619). Outsourcing hasn’t dramatically dropped the US; it’s helped the other countries get on their feet, and the US is still acting as a role model. They’ve followed through on the US’s advice and are taking responsibility for themselves and not relying on America to take care of them. So long as the US can take these changes in stride, and work with them, not against them, then each country, superpower or not, will be able to better

Countries such as France and Japan are seen as vacation destinations, not places of thinking and learning. China is seen as a terrible place mainly because they have a Communist regime. Places beyond America’s borders just weren’t important because everyone would come here, right? Ten years ago, maybe; today, not so much. Ehrenreich points out that “[e]ducation was the recommended solution for the unemployed because in the globalized future Americans would be the world’s brains”(609). Americans didn’t need to look beyond their front door because soon everyone would be coming to them. They would get their top level degree, rise to the top of a company, and sit there looking pretty while the “Mexicans and Malaysians...provide the hands”(Ehrenreich 609). Globalizing was supposed to help America rise to the top and stay there; not help other countries rise to the US’s level. And it seems that globalization has pushed the younger generations of Americans in the opposite level. More and more young adults and college students are “study[ing] and travel[ing] abroad and interact[ing] with foreign students”(Zakaria 622). They are opening up the possibilities in this world where America may not be the defining factor. Younger Americans are taking the initiative to utilize the highly tech-y world that has been created. They are learning about the