The Decline of the American Empire

One of America’s dirty little secrets, which soon threatens to become public knowledge and public shame, is how the colleges are passing along huge numbers of poorly-prepared students to the workforce, just as the high schools passed them along to the colleges.

People whose job it is to hire and train the young as they enter the job market have become increasingly appalled, and challenged by, the descending levels of aptitude -- the results of a failed educational system. In fairness though, only a portion of the blame should be on the educators as this is a systemic cultural crisis, with causal factors ranging from entertainment overload to empty diets to the breakdown of family discipline.

It’s gotten so bad that Toyota recently announced that it was placing its new auto plant in Canada, instead of in one of the several U.S. locales which were hungrily vying for it. They were clear about their reason for turning down the lavish American incentives: The workforce in this country has great difficulty with written instructions, and combined with their very low memory retention, this leads to overly long training periods followed by many workplace errors.

Take note, America. History is replete with the rise and fall of great nations who dominated the world, got rich and powerful, then fat and lazy and arrogant and decadent. Then were defeated by the next lean-and-hungry to come along. The sure-fire early-warning sign of a formerly great country's decline is the corruption and disaffection of its youth, which America has in spades.

The vast majority of the top students in U.S. colleges are Asian and Indian. They used to go to work in American companies, but due to the hyper-paranoid immigration policy changes (post 9/11 by the Bushies) and the evolvement of corporate opportunity in their home countries, they have lately been returning to those places and working for (or starting up) enterprises which will eventually dominate the world in all marketable fields.