A global economics lesson: We’re all in this together

Two weeks in Europe last month taught me two things. One is that while British newspapers the rough equivalent of American cable news channels – personality-driven, pointless and mind-numbing – European TV news is understated, fact-driven and smarter-looking than most anything we have here.

By Bob Vavra, Editor November 1, 2008

Two weeks in Europe last month taught me two things. One is that while British newspapers the rough equivalent of American cable news channels — personality-driven, pointless and mind-numbing — European TV news is understated, fact-driven and smarter-looking than most anything we have here. The other is that there is an insatiable interest in American politics and economics.

Perhaps that’s because they understand in Europe what we’ve never quite fully grasped here on the west side of the pond. We tended to view this as a collapse of the American economic market. They knew that this was a global economic crisis requiring global cooperation.

Perhaps that message is finally filtering to our manufacturing plants and our corner offices. When everyone in the world suffers from a slowdown in manufacturing and a collapse of markets, there is no longer a THEM and an US . It’s all of us, all together, all suffering, all working toward a way out.

We can get mad, of course, and there is plenty to be mad about. Some of it is corporate greed, of course, but there are some fundamentals of economics that we all should have learned in civics class. One of the reasons Baby Boomers had pretty easy lives is that our parents seldom borrowed more than they could repay. A mortgage was something you battled to burn, not something you refinanced. Our parents tried to pay cash whenever they could. They saved for a rainy day. We, their children, have lived a life based mostly on having what we can’t afford. We lived by the sword of credit for many years; we were pretty badly wounded by it in October.

So our new president has that challenge to struggle with, on top of wars and climate issues and the general health of our economy. But with the election over, perhaps we can go back to living as one nation for a little while and try that strategy.

One of the best things that occurs after an election is that we find a way as a nation to put aside the differences and try to find the common ground. Perhaps in these tough times, we find the strength to do that with the rest of the world’s citizens as well.

In our small way in manufacturing, we hope that’s one outcome of Global Plant Engineering, which debuts this month. We live in this global economy, in this global manufacturing community. It costs nothing to reach out to that community.

We can afford to reach out. We cannot afford not to.