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STEFAN AARNIO

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plus overtime to maintain the family, home, and car. In the 2000s up until 2008 with the American economic crash, the man and his wife both worked full time but still didn’t make enough money to support their family, home, and car so they subsidized their lifestyle on credit cards.

What happened over the sixty-year period from 1950 until 2010 in America?

The story I offer above is a very simplistic view of the average family in the United States, and it reflects two things (1) The competitive edge that America once had in the world by winning World War II, and (2) The entitlement mentality that has become standard in America from enjoying over fifty years of isolated propserity.

The truth is, the age of entitlement is over. No longer is America the best in the world by default when it comes to industry, medicine, or education. With the proliferation of smart phones and the Internet, the world has become very small and very flat. In the 1950s a business would compete with a few small local competitors, and a local man would competete with another local man for a job. We now live in a world where the business on the corner now competes with local business plus competition in China, India, Germany, the UK, and everywhere else in the world. The same goes for jobs: Where the man in the 1950s would compete with his local companions for a job in a factory or in an office, today that same man in America is competing with workers from all over the world in China, India, Mexico, Brazil, and many other economies.

Over the last sixty years the world has become ultra-competitive, and the world has shifted dramatically. The days of entitlement are over, and we no longer live in a world where local needs are met by local companies. There is no such thing as entitlement anymore because the competition is global, and the competition is fierce!

In the words of Dr Chester Karrass “In business and in life, you don’t get what you deserve; you get what you can negotiate.”

Over the sixty-year slide from being the “best in the world” to being just another player at the table, America gave ground through negotiations to Mexico, China, Germany, Japan, India, and other leading world pro-ducers. The government and big corporations gave away their factories,