I do not always agree with Tom Friedman (mostly b/c of the war), but it’s hard to argue with this:

Landing at Kennedy Airport from Hong Kong was, as I’ve argued before, like going from the Jetsons to the Flintstones. The ugly, low-ceilinged arrival hall was cramped, and using a luggage cart cost $3. (Couldn’t we at least supply foreign visitors with a free luggage cart, like other major airports in the world?) As I looked around at this dingy room, it reminded of somewhere I had been before. Then I remembered: It was the luggage hall in the old Hong Kong Kai Tak Airport. It closed in 1998.

I usually get annoyed when I see expats who have returned home and constantly complain about how horrible things are (and how great things were back in X country they were living in). This holds true for Americans going back to the U.S. from abroad, Chinese returning from a stint in the U.S., etc.

However, there are valid criticisms of the U.S. Friedman correctly points out that infrastructure, and in many cases this includes technology, lags far behind many other countries. To be sure, although HK is a high-tech haven, there are many parts of the U.S. that are just fine, while many areas of the PRC are still stuck in the Third World. In other words, generalizations are tricky.

I’m trying to be nice about all this and not be too critical. But again, it’s really really difficult to argue with Friedman on this:

The next day I went to Penn Station, where the escalators down to the tracks are so narrow that they seem to have been designed before suitcases were invented. The disgusting track-side platforms apparently have not been cleaned since World War II. I took the Acela, America’s sorry excuse for a bullet train, from New York to Washington. Along the way, I tried to use my cellphone to conduct an interview and my conversation was interrupted by three dropped calls within one 15-minute span.

Well, yeah. Go to just about any city in the U.S. and you’ll find big transportation problems. Boston anyone? How about navigating LA or Vegas without a car? There are some exceptions, but these are few and far between.

All of this pisses off the America First guys to no end. Lots of Americans still believe strongly that the U.S. has the best health care and educational systems in the world. All I can say to that is 你做梦呢.

As someone who gave up pre-med because the math was too difficult (only to have it forced on me 20 years later in econ grad school courses), I am well aware of the shortcomings of the U.S. educational system. Friedman explains:

My fellow Americans, we can’t continue in this mode of “Dumb as we wanna be.” We’ve indulged ourselves for too long with tax cuts that we can’t afford, bailouts of auto companies that have become giant wealth-destruction machines, energy prices that do not encourage investment in 21st-century renewable power systems or efficient cars, public schools with no national standards to prevent illiterates from graduating and immigration policies that have our colleges educating the world’s best scientists and engineers and then, when these foreigners graduate, instead of stapling green cards to their diplomas, we order them to go home and start companies to compete against ours.

To top it off, we’ve fallen into a trend of diverting and rewarding the best of our collective I.Q. to people doing financial engineering rather than real engineering. These rocket scientists and engineers were designing complex financial instruments to make money out of money — rather than designing cars, phones, computers, teaching tools, Internet programs and medical equipment that could improve the lives and productivity of millions.

Friedman is calling on the incoming Obama administration to keep all this in mind when it spends all those stimulus dollars. Similar arguments are being made in Beijing, and London, and most other countries these days (except for Germany). While I do think that we might see a lot of good transportation projects in the next few years, I am less than optimistic about education. This stuff takes a long time to turn around, and the momentum is currently in favor of China and India and most of the EU.