Global Strategies

Inculcated with “a global mindset”: our Singaporean educational competition

Singapore ran a two page advertisement on “Education in Singapore” as the centerfold of the NY Times first section on 7/7/09. Singapore is an Asian nation, really an island city state at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula. It is geographically small, has a population of 4.8 million, and a per capita GDP greater than the US.

One of the keys to their educational system is an emphasis on foreign languages and studying abroad. As their advertisement states:

            A key to Singapore’s education system is bilingualism, which strives to equip Singaporean students with language competencies that will help them better understand both Eastern and Western cultures, and to harness synergies between them.

             Singapore’s bilingual education policy starts with English, which is the main language of instruction in schools….

            In addition to English, students are required to study a mother tongue based on their ethnic identity. Within multiethnic Singapore, mother tongue can mean Chinese (Mandarin); Malay, which is spoken by more than 300 milllion people in Southeast Asia, and Tamil….

            To further this global philosophy, Singapore students have opportunity to study other languages such as French, German, Japanese, Bahasa Indonesian and Arabic.

             Language policy is only part of a greater plan that aims to inculcate young Singaporeans with a global mindset. Singapore students also participate in overseas learning experiences in schools and post-secondary schools, including student exchange programs at the university level.

Elsewhere in their articles:

            Authorities have also set goals for how many students should participate in the international program. Ten percent of primary students, 25 percent of ITE (Institute of Technical Education), 33 percent of secondary/polytechnic and 50 percent of university students will travel overseas at least once during heir school year.

 

Port of Portland: Pay Delta $3.5 million to send 3,500 students round trip to Tokyo

Why doesn't the Port of Portland take the $3.5 million it is going to hand over to Delta Airlines to keep the Portland-Tokyo route open and buy 3,500 round trip tickets and give them to Oregon students?

Rich Read’s Oregonian article “Lufthansa will end Portland-Frankfurt Flight” reports (here ):

Portland International Airport managers, dismayed that Lufthansa is suspending PDX-Frankfurt service in September, plan to pay Delta Air Lines to keep flying to Tokyo....

Managers of the Port of Portland, which operates the airport, confirmed Port commissioners would vote Wednesday on a proposed $3.5 million payment to Delta. Under the agreement, which involves no tax revenues, Delta would promise to keep daily flights through May between PDX and Japan's Narita International Airport.

N  Now, a number of comments can be made about this happening:

((   (1)   The global economy, along with its US component, is in the dumps, so this cut back is just part of a global contraction. The service will probably come back when the global economy rebounds.

((  (2)  Connecting to the global economy is important for Portland economic future. Direct air connections help. Read reports that "Delta's Tokyo flights pump more than $60 million a year into the regional economy." I do not know where the $60 million figure comes from, but I often repeat that eighty percent of global economic growth in the next few decades is forecast to come from emerging economies (lead by China). For Portland and Oregon to prosper economically, we need to get our share of those markets. Again, direct connections would help.

((  (3) A chart with the article shows that Portland only has direct international connections with Tokyo, Amsterdam, Calgary and Vancouver, BC. This is not an extensive list. We are not a city or state known for international business. This needs to change. We can change, and part of that change needs to be substantially strengthening our foreign language programs in K-12 and sending many more students to study abroad (a constant topic on this blog).

(    (4) Instead of just handing over $3.5 million to Delta Airlines, let’s buy 3,500 round trip tickets Portland-Tokyo and give them to Oregon students, K-12, community college and universities. (Roundtrip tickets start at $760 on Travelocity. I’ve budgeted them at $1,000 each).  I’m sure we have educators who could design and administer such a program.

(5)   Direct connections to international destinations are both a stimulus to and a reflection of our international business. It a virtuous circle: the better the connections, the more business; the more business, the more connections; etc. Our economic development job is to get that virtuous circle started and keep it sustained.

Turkoglu: Portland lacks “international vibes”

Portland should become a more international city. That’s our best path for a prosperous future. With eighty percent of global economic growth forecast to come from emerging markets, we should reflect upon what we can do to increase our sales of goods and services in those markets. I’ve advocated improving our K-12 foreign language programs and sending our high school students to study abroad in much larger numbers. Bills to do so died in committee in the recent legislature.

Now, we been called on our lack of “international vibes.” The Portland Trailblazers failed to sign Hedo Turkoglu because Portland does not give off enough “international vibes.” John Canzano, in his Oregonian article “Turkoglu walks when money talks,” writes (here):

Turkoglu's agent, Lon Babby, said in a conference call Saturday that the free agent chose Toronto over Portland because he and his wife, Banu, would prefer to live in the Canadian city, which has more of an international vibe. Toronto is five hours closer to Turkey. The place has lots of Turkish restaurants, baths, an annual Turkish festival and a Facebook page dedicated to the Turkish community.

I note that Portland should and could be sending many of our high school students to study abroad in Turkey, and other places. The Oregon Department of Education reports that for 2007-08 the statewide average annual operating expenditures per student was $9,140 and for the Portland School District $11,042. The study abroad organization AFS offers a high school year in Turkey (including tuition, room & board with a Turkish family, and international travel) for $8,900. Another large study abroad organization, ASSE, offers a similar high school year program in Turkey for $7,550. We can afford to send our students to study abroad.

Portland could easily, and should as a high economic development priority, have more “international vibes.” But our political and educational leaders are getting in the way.

 

 

More Stimulus, Please!

We need more federal stimulus. Much of the initial federal stimulus was poorly targeted.  I argued in February that “Taking money from schools to build road is ABSOLUTELY CRAZY,” (here) and that our national representative had “they lost touch with the need to provide stability to Oregon’s state government and the programs it funds” (here). Now, the cuts at state levels will start to bit into our national recovery, as Berkeley Professor Brad DeLong states in his blog post “Fifty Little Herbert Hoovers Watch:” (here)

The American economy appears to be nearing the end of contraction. That's good news, particularly when one considers that only about 10% of the funds authorised in this year's stimulus bill has been spent; the plan is only beginning to ramp up and outlays will peak in 2010. We should expect that injection to provide the economy with a nice boost at a critical time.

On the other hand, state budget policies are sharply contractionary at this point. Despite allocations of federal aid to states, services are being cut, state employees are being laid off, and taxes are being raised in order to balance the budgets of local governments constitutionally unable to run deficits. It's not at all clear that the federal stimulus will entirely compensate for state-level fiscal tightening, which means that American fiscal policy could, on net, be contractionary.

Easy money is doing its part, of course, but the bottom line is that the fiscal boost many are expecting may not actually materialise. This will end up causing a lot of human suffering, and it may make for a long and shallow recovery—or worse, a tipping back into contraction.

Nobody thinks that it's time to go back in the water yet. And we do need a bigger stimulus.

In Oregon, both the current cuts in programs and the new taxes (heading for referenda) will contribute to the contraction side of the equation.

China's Immense Wind Power Projects

China is on the move with wind power. It is building six immense wind power projects, each with the generating capacity of 16 large coal-fired plants. The NY Times’ Keith Bradsher reports in his article “Green Power Takes Root in the Chinese Desert” (here):

This year China is on track to pass the United States as the world’s largest market for wind turbines — after doubling wind power capacity in each of the last four years. State-owned power companies are competing to see which can build solar plants fastest, though these projects are much smaller than the wind projects. And other green energy projects, like burning farm waste to generate electricity, are sprouting up.

This oasis town deep in the Gobi Desert along the famed Silk Road and the surrounding wilderness of beige sand dunes and vast gravel wastelands has become a center of China’s drive to lead the world in wind and solar energy.

A series of projects is under construction on the nearly lifeless plateau to the southeast of Dunhuang, including one of six immense wind power projects now being built around China, each with the capacity of more than 16 large coal-fired power plants.

Each of the six projects “totally dwarfs anything else, anywhere else in the world,” said Steve Sawyer, the secretary general of the Global Wind Energy Council, an industry group in Brussels.

On the cost of wind power, it says:

By comparison, the grid buys electricity from coal-fired power plants for 4 to 5 cents a kilowatt hour. Wind turbine rates have dropped to 7 cents from 10 cents over the last couple of years because of fierce competition and declining turbine costs.

And ends with:

And wind turbines are being built faster here than the national grid can erect high-voltage power lines to carry the electricity to cities elsewhere. On the windiest days, only half the power generated can be transmitted, said Min Deqing, a local renewable energy consultant.

Nonetheless, city officials are pushing for more projects.

“It’s the Gobi Desert,” said Wang Yu, the vice director of economic planning. “There’s not much other use for it.”

Online learning more effective than face-to-face learning

I’ve blogged before (see here and here) about the important trend towards effective online education.

Now he US Department of Education reports that online instruction is more effective that face to face instruction. They say the data is solid for post-secondary students, but skimpy for K-12 students. Their online press release states (here): 

The analysis also showed that the instruction conducted wholly on line was more effective in improving student achievement than the purely face to face instruction. In addition, the report noted that the blended conditions often included additional learning time and instructional elements not received by students in control conditions.

“This new report reinforces that effective teachers need to incorporate digital content into everyday classes and consider open-source learning management systems, which have proven cost effective in school districts and colleges nationwide,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. “We must take advantage of this historic opportunity to use American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds to bring broadband access and online learning to more communities.

“To avoid being caught short when stimulus money runs out, school officials should use the short-term federal funding to make immediate upgrades to technology to enhance classroom instruction and to improve the tracking of student data,” Duncan added. “Technology presents a huge opportunity that can be leveraged in rural communities and inner-city urban settings, particularly in subjects where there is a shortage of highly qualified teachers. At the same time, good teachers can utilize new technology to accelerate learning and provide extended learning opportunities for students.”

Few rigorous research studies have been published on the effectiveness of online learning for K-12 students. The systematic search found just five experimental or controlled quasi-experimental studies comparing the learning effects of online versus face-to-face instruction for K-12 students. For this reason, caution is required in generalizing the study’s findings to the K-12 population because the results are for the most part based on studies in other settings, such as in medical, career, military training, and higher education.

“Studies of earlier generations of distance and online learning courses have concluded that they are usually as effective as classroom-based instruction,” said Marshall “Mike” Smith, a Senior Counselor to the secretary. “The studies of more recent online instruction included in this meta-analysis found that, on average, online learning, at the post-secondary level, is not just as good as but more effective than conventional face-to-face instruction..”

 

China, India & Brazil Driving the Global Economy

Recall, please, that this session of the Oregon legislature declined to expand Mandarin programs in Oregon’s public schools and refused to create the Go Global High School Study Abroad Program. Both would have prepared our next generations to sell our good and services in emerging markets.

Today (6/25/09) the NY Times reports in an article “Emerging Countries May Also Be Driving the Global Economy” by Nelson D. Schwartz and Matthew Saltmarsh that (here):

Despite fears just months ago that they would be among the biggest victims of the financial crisis, emerging giants like China, India and Brazil are set to rebound strongly next year, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development predicted Wednesday — as Europe, the United States and Japan lag.

And:

According to the O.E.C.D.’s semi-annual report, China could grow 7.7 percent this year and 9.3 percent next year, faster than previous estimates. India could grow 5.9 percent this year and 7.2 percent next year, and Brazil’s economy, after slowing down, will reverse this year and expand 4 percent next year.

The O.E.C.D. predicted the United States economy would shrink by 2.8 percent this year and grow by 0.9 percent next year, a bit better than the flat performance the organization estimated in March.

By contrast, the Japanese economy is expected to shrink 6.8 percent this year while Europe should contract 4.8 percent in 2009, with both regions hit harder than in earlier O.E.C.D. forecasts.

Let's keep an eye on where our economic opportunities are and act accordingly.

Spin won't help. "The underlying fundamentals are toxic."

I can always turn to John Robb’s blog “Global Guerrillas” for an assumption-shattering, darker view of world affairs. Just in case you thought we were going to get out of the economic mess we in, consider his latest post (6/24/09) “Spin Economics.” (here)

The underlying fundamentals are toxic:  US gross debt as a percentage of GDP (currently at 375%) is still climbing, housing prices are still falling (wealth destruction as far as the eye can see), un/underemployment is still rising (an inability to service debt), the financial industry is back to its old tricks (bonuses are shooting through the roof again, etc.), China is still manipulating its currency (dashing prospects of future jobs), commodities (higher costs for daily life) are shooting up again, etc.   Worse, what action has been taken is largely short term masking of symptoms and not a cure.  Our government "brain-trust" is using all of its financial powder on deprecated 20th Century economic measures to prop up the industries that got us into this crisis: like the greasing of palms in the bloated construction industry (what relation that industry has to our future prosperity is a big mystery) and the flooding of a failing oligopoly (the financial industry) with free money.  

Really, now tell me the bad news.

In short, the economic decline we just experienced is being primed to continue (perhaps with greater force), when the spin eventually fails to convince.  Without a means to rectify our course except for spin economics, the trend towards a post-Westphalian century replete with neo-feudalism and global guerrillas is on an inexorable march

Oregonian: "Don't ram out-of-control acquisition programs down the throat of the Pentagon. "

I’ve said it before (here), and I’ll say it again:” The F-22 program is not a jobs program.” Too many congressmen, unfortunately, think otherwise. They are increasing the budget for F-22’s beyond what the Pentagon requested. Yes, crazy. The Oregonian gets it right (here):

The wrangle in the House of Representatives recently isn't only about buying 12 more F-22 fighter jets: It's about whether Congress will permit the president to cut unnecessary defense programs that run absurdly over budget.

President Barack Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates offered a responsible plan to bring the F-22 program to a close, capping the number built at 187, or just four more than are planned.

The plane, which has never been used in a combat role and hasn't been deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan, has become a poster child for cost overruns. The price of each of the last four planes is pegged by the Air Force at about $196 million, although the true cost is closer to $350 million, according to independent analysts such as Winslow Wheeler, a director at the Center for Defense Information. (In 1999, advocates cited a "sticker price" of less than $85 million per plane.)

Yet, over the objections of House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton, D-Mo., the committee voted 31-30 this month to expand the program. It would do so over the objections of the Pentagon itself and, further, would take the initial money for additional production from a separate program to clean up nuclear sites.

This craziness comes to you courtesy of a system in which contractors such as Lockheed-Martin scatter production jobs around the country, employing workers in enough congressional districts to ensure widespread support of arms-building programs, no matter how inefficient or unnecessary they are.

Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., is proposing an amendment that would restore the F-22 program to original funding levels proposed by the Pentagon. He sees it as a first -- and therefore, critically important -- test of whether Congress will let the administration reshape the defense budget.

The House should embrace the Frank amendment. If this president and this secretary of defense aren't allowed to end a program as wasteful as the F-22, then the contractors are running the national defense program, to the detriment of national military and economic policy.

Although some in Congress attempt to lecture the Pentagon on the strategic importance of the F-22, the fact is they are most interested in protecting jobs in their districts. Yet the money spent on the F-22 would be better spent on the Joint Strike Fighter, the F-35, which is also built by Lockheed-Martin and also has a broad constituency around the country. (It has a broad constituency around the world, actually, with other allies participating in production and as potential customers.)

If the Democrats who control the House of Representatives want to help their president succeed and, coincidentally, do the responsible thing for the country, they should make sure that a few self-interested members don't ram out-of-control acquisition programs down the throat of the Pentagon.

The Oregonian is calling this one right!

Democrats, beware! Don't let this spending get out of control!

 

Oregon's Gas Tax Failure Supports Iranian Tyrants

With oil prices creeping up, more money will be flowing to petrostates around the world. This is not good. Many are hostile to our interests, or even to the interests of their own people. Tom Friedman’s op-ed today (6/24/09) “The Green Revolution(s)” focuses on just one: Iran (here):

There has been a lot of worthless chatter about what President Barack Obama should say about Iran’s incipient “Green Revolution.” Sorry, but Iranian reformers don’t need our praise. They need the one thing we could do, without firing a shot, that would truly weaken the Iranian theocrats and force them to unshackle their people. What’s that? End our addiction to the oil that funds Iran’s Islamic dictatorship. Launching a real Green Revolution in America would be the best way to support the “Green Revolution” in Iran.

Oil is the magic potion that enables Iran’s turbaned shahs — “Shah Khamenei” and “Shah Ahmadinejad” — to snub their noses at the world and at many of their own people as well. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad behaves like someone who was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple. By coincidence, he’s been president of Iran during a period of record high oil prices. So, although he presides over an economy that makes nothing the world wants, he can lecture us about how the West is in decline and the Holocaust was a “myth.” Trust me, at $25 a barrel, he won’t be declaring that the Holocaust was a myth anymore.

The Obama team wants to pursue talks with Iran over its nuclear program, no matter who wins there. Fine. But the issue is not talk or no talk. The issue is leverage or no leverage. I love talking to people — especially in the Middle East — on one condition: that we have the leverage. As long as oil prices are high, Iran will have too much leverage and will be able to resist concessions on its nuclear program. With oil at $70 a barrel, our economic sanctions on Iran are an annoyance; at $25, they really hurt.

In Oregon, our legislative session is about to close down. No substantial, revenue neutral gas tax was even proposed. No hearings. Nothing. Just a small gas tax raise for infrastructure. Just shame.

Friedman has been a long supporter of a gas tax. Longer than me. He’s right to put it out there again:

Mr. Obama has already started some excellent energy-saving initiatives. But we need more. Imposing an immediate “Freedom Tax” of $1 a gallon on gasoline — with rebates to the poor and elderly — would be a triple positive: It would stimulate more investment in renewable energy now; it would stimulate more consumer demand for the energy-efficient vehicles that the reborn General Motors and Chrysler are supposed to make; and, it would reduce our oil imports in a way that would surely affect the global price and weaken every petro-dictator.