It is already somewhat like that; if you watch the discovery channel shows on mega projects and the like they are all in Asia, or to a lesser extent Europe. And you see lots of North Americans working on them … Dubai is full of Canadian engineers and architects, construction chiefs etc.

And while I don’t think that a big project is always a good project – many just screw up the environment in a bigger way, they do represent an investment in the future.

NorAm culture is about lots of money quickly. We don’t have many big long term projects with construction periods of years or decades. ( New York water tunnels one of the notable exceptions.) Creative and innovative things are only as good as the amount of extra zeros the CEO / MBA / hedgefund seller can tack on the end of his paycheck.

Its why the fate of the Avro Arro hits home to so many Canadians – we know in our gut that it in a nutshell describes exactly what you are talking about.

It’s very interesting when you go to the Maritimes. You see all these towns that once were the industrial giants of North America … then it became cheaper to move the factories to central locations in the Maritimes, and then to Ontario and Quebec. Now, those too are losing out. But, in each case the places that the companies moved to had no sympathy for the places losing the factories and jobs … it never occurred to them that one day they would be the “old and inefficient” victims of “market forces”.

I’m not a communist, nor even a socialist really, but I do believe we as a culture need to stop thinking that we have nothing to do with “market forces”, that Adam Smiths “invisible” hand is some sort of supernatural phenomenon beyond the influence of mere mortals.

As to your comment that when most everyone is low paid then low paying jobs will get respect, it would be nice but when you look at the developing world … I don’t see it. You get a small uber class and a large peasant class that desperately wants to do anything to not be peasants.

It will be interesting to see how things turn out in a 100 – 200 years. Right now there is an unprecedented in history worldwide cultural mixing thanks to air travel, and telecommunications. What that new ‘world culture’ will be like will tell the tale – will it combine the right good elements or will it just combine some of the fatal flaws?