Rambling on the decline of America

I couldn't sleep very much on Friday night so decided to watch the four Charlie Rose shows I brought along courtesy of Tivo-To-Go. It was an interesting mix from late September/October mostly devoted to the current crisis.: Howard Stringer on the business of Sony, Floyd Norris and Alan (twitch) Blinder on the economy, Bob Nardelli on Chrysler, and Tom Friedman on energy policy.

(OK, the recording of Friedman was from earlier this summer when he was promoting his new book, but I didn't watch it until now and the juxtaposition was interesting.)

One of Friedman's points is that due to economic policy, energy policy, etc, America is now on a slow decline. And that's one of the very scary things in this election cycle because slow declines aren't really noticeable day by day and it's very hard to galvinize people for change. You simply wake up in 20 years look back and say WTF?

In retrospect, my depression in listening to these shows was exacerbated by my final day in Tokyo. I went to Odaiba to see Miraikan, the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation. I'm sure I looked like most of the little kids wandering around exploring robots, climate change, and chemistry ... except that the four year olds understand substantially more Japanese then I do. But here is a culture that places a high value on science education, and has a proud engineering heritage.

When I left the museum, I decided to walk back to the train station by way of a large shopping mall to kill some time before I had to catch the (long) bus ride back to Narita. And on the way ran into a Toyota showcase. They literally had dozens of different Toyota models on display - most were unique to the Japan market, but some like the Crown appeared to be the Japan market version of the Camry - where it really is closer in feel to an American Buick. It was a blast to wander around and sit in the various cars. But I thought back Nardelli's appearance on Charlie Ros, and to my recent experiences renting cars at home that were Chrysler-designed. Most of the American cars are not aspirational vehicles for me ... but in general the "quality" that I could "feel" on the plethora of Toyota cars was substantially better. Switches, compartments, etc, just felt right. They really know how engineer cars well - with the exception of a certain 2002 Blue Camry...