When I was growing up in Los Angles during the fifties, the most exciting day of the year was when my dad took me to buy a Christmas tree. With its semi desert climate, Southern California offered pine trees that were scraggly at best. So the Southern Pacific Railroad made a big deal out of bringing trees down from much better endowed Oregon to supply holiday revelers.

You had to go down to the freight yard at Union Station on Alameda Street to pick them up. I remember a jolly Santa standing in a box car with trees piled high to the ceiling, pungent with seasonal evergreen smells, handing them out to crowds of eager, smiling buyers for a buck apiece. Watching great lumbering steam engines as big as houses whistling and belching smoke was enthralling.

We took our prize home to be decorated by seven kids hyped on adrenalin, chugging eggnog. A half century later, the Southern Pacific is gone, the steam engines are in museums, anyone going near a rail yard would be mugged or arrested for vagrancy, and Dad long ago passed away. Dried out trees at Target for $30 didn?t strike the right chord.

So I bundled the kids into the SUV and drove to the primeval, foggy coastal redwood forests of Northern California. Five miles down a muddy logging road, it was just us and a million trees. The kids, hyped on adrenalin, made the decision about which perfect eight footer to take home. I personally chopped it down, tied it to the roof, and drove us the three hours home. With any luck, these memories will last until the next century, long outlast me.

 

?Unless developed economies learn to compete the old fashioned way ? by making more goods and making them better, the smart money will continue to move offshore to Asia, Brazil, and other developing economies both in the asset and the currency space. The United States, in short, needs to make things, and not paper,? said Bill Gross, the managing director and co- chief investment officer of bond giant PIMCO.

Those of you counting on getting your old union assembly line job back in Detroit can forget it.

The recent eight year forecast published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that 4.19 million jobs will be gained in the US in professional and business services, followed by 4 million health care and social assistance jobs, while 1.2 million will be lost in manufacturing. This is great news for website designers, Internet entrepreneurs, registered nurses, and masseuses in California, but grim tidings for traditional metal bashers in the rust belt manufacturing states like Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio.

I?m so old now that I am no longer asked for a driver?s license to get into a night club. Instead, they ask for a carbon dating. The real challenge for we aged career advisors is that probably half of these new service jobs haven?t even been invented yet, and if they can be described, it is only in a cheesy science fiction paperback with a half dressed blond on the front cover. After all, who heard of a webmaster, a cell phone contract sales person, or a blogger 40 years ago? Where are all these jobs going to? You guessed it, China, which by my calculation, has imported 25 million jobs from the US over the past decade. You can also blame other lower waged, upstream manufacturing countries like Vietnam, where the Middle Kingdom is increasingly subcontracting its own offshoring.

These forecasts may be optimistic, because they assume that Americans can continue to claw their way up the value chain in the global economy, and not get stuck along the way, as the Japanese did in the nineties. The US desperately needs no less than 27 million new jobs to soak up natural population and immigration growth and get us back to a traditional 5% unemployment rate. The only way that is going to happen is for America to invent something new and big, and fast. Personal computers achieved this during the eighties, and the Internet did the trick in the nineties. The fact that we?ve done diddly squat since 2000 but create a giant paper chase of subprime loans and derivatives explains why job growth since then has been zero, real wage growth has been negative, and American standards of living are falling.

Alternative energy and biotechnology are two possible drivers for a new economy. Unfortunately, the last administration did everything it could to stymie progress in both these fields, coddling big oil so China could steal a lead in several alternative technologies, and starving stem cell researchers of Federal cash, ceding the lead there to others. While the current crop of politicians extol the virtues of education, the reality is that we are dumbing down our public education system and chopping budgets with a hatchet. How do we invent the next ?new? thing, while shrinking the University of California?s budget by 20% two years in a row? If my local high school can?t afford new computers, how is it going to feed Silicon Valley with computer literate work force? The US has a ?Michael Jackson? economy. It?s still living like a rock star, but hasn?t had a hit in 20 years.

China can have all the $20 a day jobs it wants. But if it accelerates its move up the value chain, as it clearly aspires to do, then America is in for even harder times. I?ll be hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst. How do you say ?unemployment check? in Mandarin?