I'm Going to Bring the Jobs Back

There are many mysteries about the present US administration, but one that intrigues me, in particular, came when POTUS claimed, "I'm going to bring the jobs back." I asked US Consul General James W. Boje Hermann which jobs, given that unemployment in the States is below 5%, i.e., there is full employment.

Friederike Schulte, Director of Freiburg's Carl-Schurz-Haus,
introducing US Consul General James W. Boje Hermann.

On Thursday night, Consul Hermann spoke about and discussed The State of Transatlantic Business Relations Today in Freiburg. Regarding jobs, I told him I read "Assembled in China" on the box of my latest iPad.

In the following discussion, the consul agreed that bringing 20,000 miners back to work would not change the statistics. In addition, it is a fact that the industry does not want any coal.

POTUS, too, must have realized that he cannot revive outdated jobs. So on June 15, he signed the executive order, as the Daily Mail reported, Apprenticeship and Workforce of Tomorrow, which aims to create a new channel of approval for apprenticeships. He is calling on Congress to commit $100 million in new money to the initiative and expand the allowable uses of student financial aid so students can use the support for "earn while you learn" programs.

POTUS smiles, having signed the executive order
Apprenticeship and Workforce of Tomorrow

In fact, workers in the States, with their high salaries, will never compete with those people in both Chinas making baseball caps.

A strange constellation:
Capitalist Taiwan has people working in communist China.

If "old" jobs cannot be brought back, the US must create other, new, and "better" ones. Those new jobs are becoming available in more complex technologies where learning by doing is no longer sufficient.

Ivanka and Angela at a round table in Washington (©AP)

Here, Ivanka Trump has positively influenced her father. During Angela Merkel's spring visit to the States, she sat with our chancellor, discussing the German dual education system. 

This system is nearly as old as Red Baron, who recalls that, following high school, he attended Berufsschule (vocational school) once a week during a practical year at a shipyard in Bremen, learning the "theoretical" background for his then "practical" work. 

To make a long story short: later, as a physicist, I knew how to drill a hole in an aluminum sheet (not easy!) and could operate a lathe.

On the one hand, POTUS has adopted one of Obama's favorite projects on the quiet while he is trying hard to replace Obamacare. Here, another look at Germany would have shown him that replacing an existing health system with a better and cheaper one is impossible.

In the history of the Federal Republic, we have had at least five major reforms to our public health system aimed at making it less costly and more efficient. We always failed, for, in the end, any reform resulted in more bureaucracy and higher costs.

The entropy law of health systems goes like this: As hard as you may try, any existing or modified health system will become less efficient and more expensive with time.

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