I raved about Hong Kong previously, but a couple of days ago Thomas Friedman wrote a much better essay on the NYT about returning to the US from Hong Kong:
It actually started well, on Kau Sai Chau, an island off Hong Kong, where I stood on a rocky hilltop overlooking the South China Sea and talked to my wife back in Maryland, static-free, using a friend’s Chinese cellphone. A few hours later, I took off from Hong Kong’s ultramodern airport after riding out there from downtown on a sleek high-speed train — with wireless connectivity that was so good I was able to surf the Web the whole way on my laptop.
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.
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.
My quote was much less eloquent:
Yeah, the phone booths have WiFi; the US has become a second-world nation in many ways.
Friedman goes on to inveigle the vast numbers of smart, ambitious people who went to Wall Street and similar where ”Bonuses, Not Profits, Were Real” instead of actual productive work such as science or engineering. I can personally attest to the brain drain from the national labs, where really really smart PhDs were recruited to do modeling and prediction. Unmatched pay (I refuse to sully perfectly good English by availing myself of euphemisms like “compensation.”) and working conditions, compared to places like FNAL where we had pest-infested doublewide trailers:
You’ve not had fun until you have a raccoon die under your trailer and rot there for a few months. Yum.
Anyway, Friedman nails it in how modern HK is compared to the USA, and how we’d best stop wasting our best minds on financial prestidigitation. Go have a read.