Page 158 - The Drucker Lectures

The New Priorities [ 139

can history can be summed up in one sentence: The objective
of Mexico was to make the Rio Grande a little wider than the
Atlantic Ocean. A Mexican proverb says, “If you are in bed with
an elephant, it doesn’t help you that the elephant means well.”
And this elephant hasn’t always meant well, by the way. And yet
Mexican policies—all of which had one goal to make Mexico
economically and culturally independent of those nasty, pushy,
aggressive, dangerous Yankees—has been a total failure. And so
they finally accepted that if you can’t lick them you have to join
them. That’s one of the greatest reversals in history.
It is now 500 years since Columbus thought he had found
Japan and instead found America, and we are now in the pro-
cess of rediscovering America. For 500 years, all relationships in
the New World were not with the New World but with the Old
World. My wife has Argentinean cousins who went to Argentina
in 1852 and every one of them went to school back to England
until the current generation. Her cousin, Roberto, went to the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And only now, we in this
country still don’t know Latin America, but Latin America now
looks north instead of looking east. And we are beginning to be
very skeptical about all those predictions about the Pacific Rim. I
think the real integration is going to be within the Americas.
We’ve also moved from a society in which capital was its
scarce resource into one in which knowledge is the scarce re-
source. If you have the knowledge, you can get the money. The
Japanese government now pays you to move factories out of
Japan, not because there is a scarcity of blue-collar labor there,
but because blue-collar labor offers a very poor return on society’s
investment. By the time a kid has finished high school—whether
having learned anything or not is another matter—you have an
investment close to a hundred thousand bucks, and you don’t
get it back if that youngster becomes a blue-collar worker. You
have to make sure that he or she in Japan becomes a knowledge