The World Is Flat (40 page)

No wonder Johns Hopkins University president Bill Brody remarked to me, “Over 60 percent of our graduate students in the sciences are foreign students, and mostly from Asia. At one point four years ago all of our graduate students in mathematics were from the PRC [Communist China]. I only found out about it because we use them as [teaching assistants] and some of them don't speak English all that well.” A Johns Hopkins parent wrote Brody to complain that his son could not understand his calculus professor because of his heavy Chinese accent and poor English.

No wonder there is not a major company that I interviewed for this book that is not investing significantly in research and development abroad. It is not “follow the money.” It is “follow the brains.”

“Science and math are the universal language of technology,” said Tracy Koon, Intel's director of corporate affairs, who oversees the company's efforts to improve science education. “They drive technology and our standards of living. Unless our kids grow up knowing that universal language, they will not be able to compete. We are not in the business of manufacturing somewhere else. This is a company that was founded here, but we have two raw materials-sand, which we have a ready supply of, and talent, which we don't.” (Silicon comes from sand.)

“We looked at two things,” she continued. “We looked at the fact that in disciplines that were relevant to our industry, the number of U.S. students graduating at the master's and Ph.D. levels was declining in absolute numbers and relative to other countries. In our K to twelve we were doing okay at the fourth-grade level, we were doing middle-of-the-road in the eighth grade, and by the twelfth grade we were hovering near the bottom in international tests related to math. So the longer kids were in school, the dumber they were getting... You have teachers turning off kids because they were not trained. You know the old saw about the football coach teaching science-people who do not have the ability to make this accessible and gripping for kids.”

One of the problems in remedying the situation, said Koon, is the fact that education in America is relatively decentralized and fragmented. If Intel goes to India or China or Jordan and introduces a teacher education program for making science more interesting, it can get into schools all over the country at once. In America, the public schools are overseen by fifty different state governments. While Intel does sponsor research at the university level that will benefit its own product development, it is growing increasingly concerned about the feeder system into those universities and the job market.

“Have we seen any change here? No, not really,” said Koon. So Intel has been lobbying the INS for an increase in the number of advanced foreign engineers allowed into the United States on temporary work visas. “When we look at the kinds of people that we are trying to hire here-the master's and Ph.D. levels in photonics and optics engineering and very large-scale computer architecture-what we are finding is that as you go up the food chain from bachelor's to master's to Ph.D.'s, the number of people graduating from top-tier universities in those fields are increasingly foreign-born. So what do you do? For years [America] could count on the fact that we still have the best higher-education system in the world. And we made up for our deficiencies in K through twelve by being able to get all these good students from abroad. But now fewer are coming and fewer are staying... We have no God-given right to be able to hire all these people, and little by little we won't have the first-round draft choices. People who graduate in these very technical fields that are critical to our industries should get a green card stapled to their diploma.”

It appears that young people wanting to be lawyers started to swamp those wanting to be engineers and scientists in the 1970s and early 1980s. Then, with the dot-com boom, those wanting to go to business school and earn MBAs swamped engineering students and lawyers in the 1990s.

One can also hope that the marketplace will address the shortage of engineers and scientists by changing the incentives.

“Intel has to go where the IQ is,” said Koon. Remember, she repeated, Intel's chips are made from just two things-sand and brains, “and right now the brains are the problem... We will need a stronger and more supportive immigration system if we want to hire the people who want to stay here. Otherwise, we will go where they are. What are the alternatives? I am not talking about data programmers or [people with] B.S. degrees in computer science. We are talking about high-end specialized engineering. We have just started a whole engineering function in Russia, where engineers have wonderful training-and talk about underemployed! We are beefing that up. Why wouldn't you?”

Wait a minute: Didn't we win the Cold War? If one of America's premier technology companies feels compelled to meet its engineering needs by going to the broken-down former Soviet Union, where the only thing that seems to work is old-school math and science education, then we've got a quiet little crisis on our hands. One cannot stress enough the fact that in the flat world the frontiers of knowledge get pushed out farther and farther, faster and faster. Therefore, companies need the brainpower that can not only reach the new frontiers but push them still farther. That is where the breakthrough drugs and software and hardware products are going to be found. And America either needs to be training that brainpower itself or importing it from somewhere else -or ideally both—if it wants to dominate the twenty-first century the way it dominated the twentieth-and that simply is not happening.

“There are two things that worry me right now,” said Richard A. Rashid, the director of research for Microsoft. “One is the fact that we have really dramatically shut down the pipeline of very smart people coming to the United States. If you believe that we have the greatest re-seach universities and opportunities, it all has to be driven by IQ. In trying to create processes that protect the country from undesirables, [the government] has done a much better job of keeping out desirables. A really significant fraction of the top people graduated from our universities [in science and engineering] were not born here, but stayed here and created the businesses, and became the professors, that were engines for our economic growth. We want these people. In a world where IQ is one of the most important commodities, you want to get as many smart people as you can.”

Second, said Rashid, “We have done a very poor job of conveying to kids the value of science and technology as a career choice that will make the world a better place. Engineering and science is what led to so many improvements in our lives. But you talk to K through twelve kids about changing the world and they don't look at computer science as a career that is going to be a great thing. The amazing thing is that it is hard to get women into computer science now, and getting worse. Young women in junior high are told this is a really wretched lifestyle. As a result, we are not getting enough students through our systems who want to be computer scientists and engineers, and if we cut off the flow from abroad, the confluence of those two will potentially put us in a very difficult position ten or fifteen years from now. It is a pipeline process. It won't come to roost right away, but fifteen or twenty years from now, you'll find you don't have the people and the energy in these areas where you need them.”

From Richard Rashid at Microsoft in the Northwest to Tracy Koon at Intel in Silicon Valley to Shirley Ann Jackson at Rensselaer on the East Coast, the people who understand these issues the best and are closest to them have the same message: Because it takes fifteen years to create a scientist or advanced engineer, starting from when that young man or woman first gets hooked on science and math in elementary school, we should be embarking on an all-hands-on-deck, no-holds-barred, no-budget-too-large crash program for science and engineering education immediately. The fact that we are not doing so is our quiet crisis. Scientists and engineers don't grow on trees. They have to be educated through a long process, because, ladies and gentlemen, this really is rocket science.

We have the power to shape the civilization that we want. But we need your will, your labor, your hearts, if we are to build that kind of society. Those who came to this land sought to build more than just a new country. They sought a new world. So I have come here today to your campus to say that you can make their vision our reality. So let us from this moment begin our work so that in the future men will look back and say: It was then, after a long and weary way, that man turned the exploits of his genius to the full enrichment of his life.

—“Great Society” speech, Lyndon B. Johnson, 1964

As a person who grew up during the Cold War, I'll always remember driving along down the highway and listening to the radio, when suddenly the music would stop and a grim-voiced announcer would come on the air and say, “This is a test of the emergency broadcast system,” and then there would be a thirty-second high-pitched siren sound. Fortunately, we never had to live through a moment in the Cold War where the announcer came on and said, “This is not a test.” That, however, is exactly what I want to say here: This is not a test.

The long-term opportunities and challenges that the flattening of the world puts before the United States are profound. Therefore, our ability to get by doing things the way we've been doing them-which is to say, not always tending to our secret sauce and enriching it-will not suffice anymore. “For a country as wealthy as we are, it is amazing how little we are doing to enhance our natural competitiveness,” said Dinakar Singh, the Indian-American hedge fund manager. “We are in a world that has a system that now allows convergence among many billions of people, and we had better step back and figure out what it means. It would be a nice coincidence if all the things that were true before are still true now-but there are quite a few things you actually need to do differently... You need to have a much more thoughtful national discussion.” The flat world, Singh argued, is now the elephant in the room, and the question is, What is it going to do to us, and what are we going to do to it?

If this moment has any parallel in American history, it is the height of the Cold War, around 1957, when the Soviet Union leaped ahead of America in the space race by putting up the Sputnik satellite. Yes, there are many differences between that age and our own. The main challenge then came from those who wanted to put up walls; the main challenge to America today comes from the fact that all the walls are being taken down, and other countries can now compete with us much more directly. The main challenge in that world was from those practicing extreme communism, namely, Russia, China, and North Korea. The main challenge to America today is from those practicing extreme capitalism, namely, China, India, and South Korea. The main objective in that era was building a strong state; the main objective in this era is building strong individuals.

What this era has in common with the Cold War era, though, is that to meet the challenges of flatism requires as comprehensive, energetic, and focused a response as did meeting the challenge of communism. It requires our own version of the New Frontier and Great Society adapted to the age of flatness. It requires a president who can summon the nation to get smarter and study harder in science, math, and engineering in order to reach the new frontiers of knowledge that the flat world is rapidly opening up and pushing out. And it requires a Great Society that commits our government to building the infrastructure, safety nets, and institutions that will help every American become more employable in an age when no one can be guaranteed lifetime employment. I call my own version of this approach compassionate flatism.

Getting Americans to rally around compassionate flatism is much more difficult than getting them to rally around anticommunism. “National peril is a lot easier to convey than individual peril,” noted Johns Hopkins University foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum. Economics, as noted, is not like war, because economics can always be a win-win game. But sometimes I wish economics were more like war. In the Cold War, we actually got to see the Soviets parade their missiles in Red Square. We all got to be scared together, from one end of the country to the other, and all our politicians had to be focused and serious about marshaling the resources and educational programs to make sure Americans could keep pace with the Soviet Union.

But today, alas, there is no missile threat coming from India. The “hot line,” which used to connect the Kremlin with the White House, has been replaced by the “help line,” which connects everyone in America to call centers in Bangalore. While the other end of the hotline might have had Leonid Brezhnev threatening nuclear war, the other end of the help line just has a soft voice eager to help you sort out your AOL bill or collaborate with you on a new piece of software. No, that voice has none of the menace of Nikita Khrushchev pounding a shoe on the table at the UN, and it has none of the sinister snarl of the bad guys in From Russia with Love. There is no Boris or Natasha saying “We will bury you” in a thick Russian accent. No, that voice on the help line just has a friendly Indian lilt that masks any sense of threat or challenge. It simply says: “Hello, my name is Rajiv. Can I help you?”

No, Rajiv, actually, you can't.

When it comes to responding to the challenges of the flat world, there is no help line we can call. We have to dig into ourselves. We in America have all the tools to do that, as I argued in Chapter 6. But, as I argued in Chapter 7, we have not been tending to those tools as we should. Hence, our quiet crisis. The assumption that because America's economy has dominated the world for more than a century, it will and must always be that way is as dangerous an illusion today as the illusion that America would always dominate in science and technology was back in 1950. But this is not going to be easy. Getting our society up to speed for a flat world is going to be extremely painstaking. We are going to have to start doing a lot of things differently. It is going to take the sort of focus and national will that President John F. Kennedy called for in his famous May 25, 1961, speech to Congress on “urgent national needs.” At that time, America was recovering from the twin shocks of Sputnik and the Soviet space launch of a cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, less than two months before Kennedy's speech. Kennedy knew that while America had enormous human and institutional assets-far more than the Soviet Union-they were not being fully utilized.