One of the podcast I enjoy a lot listening to lately is the UC Berkeley History 7B by Professor Jennifer Burns.

This course covers US History from Civil War to the present days. Some stories are amazing, some stories make your blood boiled. In about 40 lecture audio (usually about 1 hour in length), one will be able to walk through the path that USA as nation has taken to become what she is today in last 150 years, without the stress of examination and tutorial. Isn’t it a good deal?

I have learn a lot of interesting thing from this series of podcast. For example, since the Reconstruction, industries in the North started moving to the South to take advantage of the cheap labor and land cost there. The seeking of cheaper production cost is obviously not a recent phenomenas. Coupled with today’s technology, the shift of production base has a even wider and farther reaches. No longer confined within a national/cultural border, production process are either continuing to move South to Mexico or relocated to overseas (such as China) altogether.

Now, after 20 years of development, the production cost of China finally starts to rise. The factory owners immediately respond to it and moving the plants to other cheaper location such as Bangladesh or Vietnam.

Public sentiment in developed countries, without exception, always blames ‘Other People’ for ‘stealing’ their jobs. The blame is laid on the wrong subjects.