Thomas Friedman has published an editorial in the New York Times Magazine entitled It’s a Flat World, After All. While the article lays on the technology utopia cheese a little thick (wireless internet will save us all, etc.), he hits on a critical point: the political and economic dominance of America is going to end.
“The percentage of a population with a college degree is important, but so are sheer numbers. In 2001, India graduated almost a million more students from college than the United States did. China graduates twice as many students with bachelor’s degrees as the U.S., and they have six times as many graduates majoring in engineering. In the international competition to have the biggest and best supply of knowledge workers, America is falling behind.”
And so The Descent of the American Empire continues.
> And so The Descent of the American Empire continues.
I’m not sure I agree with this assessment, as there’s much more to the ‘status’ of a country than sheer numbers of college graduates. Along with vast populations come a number of challenges that we in America doesn’t have to deal with, and both China and India have a great deal to overcome.
College graduates are important, of course, though there’s a significant difference between someone leaving college in order to build/design widgets and someone leaving college to start a company based on fresh new ideas and innovations. I think the entrepreneurial and innovative spirit that seems to thrive in the US is as much a contributor to our success as the XYZ number of PhD’s that we have. Countries with a history of collectivist, statist philosophies are going to have a hard time competing with that, even if they have a relatively large number of Smart Peopleâ?¢.
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A couple of related thoughts:
It’s interesting that someone would use the term ‘descent’, as if the uplifting of other countries means that we are necessarily on the decline. It’s not exactly a zero sum game, though I suppose it makes for more provocative headlines.
It’s also interesting that in ‘surpassing’ us, the countries in question are essentially becoming us. Assuming that this growth is also matched by newly founded democratic and free market ideals, is it really such a big deal? Countries will become more free (in the social and economic sense), and we’ll gain another market to purchase our services and goods. I don’t see anything particularly wrong with that.
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No, I don’t think America is necessarily in a decline at all, though there are certainly those who wish it were so.
Caste system, Communism, Corruption, and those are just the C’s. India and China have quite a way to go before they reach 1st world status.
This whole “Decline of the America Empire” shtick is tired.
Progress in the China and India is so rapid because they have only recently embraced capitalism. Jeff is right, the creation of wealth is not a sum-zero game. If it were, the Allies should have left the Axis powers in ruin to prevent competition. Instead, Japan and Germany contribute to the global economy and everyone is better off.
Can someone tell me how I (an American) would be worse off if tomorrow China was a free, open, successful society?
Speaking as a non-American, I believe the American “empire” is simply dead. The US is still the biggest military and economic power, but it’s just not “the leader of the free world,” as Americans like to put it. Actually, I’ve never heard anybody outside the US say it…
Well, India and China both have 5-6 times the population of the US, so you’d hope they’d graduate more people. I haven’t actually checked, but I’d be willing to bet that if you look at degrees earned as a percentage of population, the US is still well ahead. Not that that really means anything. I’m just saying there are better arguments for why the US is “declining” than some educational statistics that may or may not be meaningful.
A more optimistic take on this is Daniel Pink’s new book “A Whole New Mind”, which identifies the same “threats” to traditional US approaches and skills, but also describes specific techniques and abilities (including Design!) that will be crucial in the future.
BTW, when I read Friedman’s peice, I practically could hear Pink’s lawyers sharpening their pencils. Some of the specific examples Friedman uses appear almost verbatim in Pink’s book; it’s a little odd.
Jeff: Did you click on the link embedded in that sentance? If you did it would have been clear that Steven was adding this posts point to the numerous other points he made in that previous post, not basing his opinion entirely on one argument.
‘Countries becoming you’ is a rather fanciful notion, as is the notion that all these other countrries are just aping your history and haven’t had any innovations or entrepreneurs of their own.
I know what you are trying to say on the uplifting of other coutries doesn’t equate to decline in America, but isn’t it an old american adage of capitalism that; “If you aren’t moving forward, you’re really falling behind.”?
Joel: Besides communism, how is North America different exactly???
Nathan: Stop and think about China or India in the next two decades slowly emerging as a technology supplier or a manufacturing superpower and doing it for half the money US companies charge because their depressed economies haven’t caught up with yours, you think that won’t affect the US??? You are already suffering job loss from outsourcing, it was an election issue, I don’t see what you need explained….
These are all just my opinions, and I respect and admire the fact you all were willing to share your opinions.
“I had Lufthansa business class…”
Isn’t it easier to comment positively on the state of the world from this perspective?
“Globalization 3.0 is not only going to be driven more by individuals but also by a much more diverse — non-Western, nonwhite — group of individuals. In Globalization 3.0, you are going to see every color of the human rainbow take part.”
Strange. In American culture the idea of a clash between civilizations seems to be predominant, at least much more discussed. I seldom found proposals for other approaches like the “Projekt Weltethos” of Hans Küng. When it was introduced to the United Nations in November 2001 (“Dialogue among civilizations”) there was no coverage in the U.S.-media whatsoever.
”Today, the most profound thing to me is the fact that a 14-year-old in Romania or Bangalore or the Soviet Union or Vietnam has all the information, all the tools, all the software easily available to apply knowledge however they want,” said Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of Netscape (…).”
All the tools easily available? That is plain untrue. And “a” (14-year-old) implicates “many” or even “every”. Closer to reality would be “few”.
“(…) the upside is that by connecting all these knowledge pools we are on the cusp of an incredible new era of innovation, an era that will be driven from left field and right field, from West and East and from North and South. (…) anyone with smarts, access to Google and a cheap wireless laptop can join the innovation fray.”
The North-South divide is as big as ever, from what I can extrapolate. Google is not the solution for this nor the Holy Grail, just a search engine.
“”The Berlin Wall was not only a symbol of keeping people inside Germany; it was a way of preventing a kind of global view of our future,” the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen said. And the wall went down just as the windows went up — the breakthrough Microsoft Windows 3.0 operating system, which helped to flatten the playing field even more by creating a global computer interface, shipped six months after the wall fell.”
Correction: The Wall kept people inside East Germany. The rest was already capitalistic and “free”. As far as I know did Apple originally invent the interface, Microsoft used its market power to spread it.
“That overinvestment, by companies like Global Crossing, resulted in the willy-nilly creation of a global undersea-underground fiber network, which in turn drove down the cost of transmitting voices, data and images to practically zero, which in turn accidentally made Boston, Bangalore and Beijing next-door neighbors overnight.”
The costs are not zero. In real life there is indeed a digital divide. Plus, space-time still counts. Man is not digitalized yet.
“No country accidentally benefited more from the Netscape moment than India. ”India had no resources and no infrastructure,” said Dinakar Singh, one of the most respected hedge-fund managers on Wall Street, whose parents earned doctoral degrees in biochemistry from the University of Delhi before emigrating to America. ”It produced people with quality and by quantity. But many of them rotted on the docks of India like vegetables. Only a relative few could get on ships and get out.”
In some places China actually treads workers “like vegetables”. Once used and ill they are thrown away like garbage.
“I send my whole factory from Canton, Ohio, to Canton, China.”
How many people own factories? From whose point of view do you write? For whom?
“This is Wal-Mart’s specialty. I create a global supply chain down to the last atom of efficiency so that if I sell an item in Arkansas, another is immediately made in China.”
Is this what it all boils down to? Efficiency? This is not enlightenment anymore.
“The last new form of collaboration I call ”informing” — this is Google, Yahoo and MSN Search, which now allow anyone to collaborate with, and mine, unlimited data all by themselves.”
That does not provide orientational knowledge at all. What is most important is the ability to sort out what is relevant, not unlimited data.
“(…) wireless access and voice over Internet protocol (VoIP). What the steroids do is turbocharge all these new forms of collaboration, so you can now do any one of them, from anywhere, with any device.”
Again – a categorical “any” is just not true. This is as uncritical as it gets.
“The world got flat when all 10 of these flatteners converged around the year 2000. This created a global, Web-enabled playing field that allows for multiple forms of collaboration on research and work in real time, without regard to geography, distance or, in the near future, even language.”
Ditto above. Sorry, but your style has increasingly contours of economical propaganda.
“No, not everyone has access yet to this platform, but it is open now to more people in more places on more days in more ways than anything like it in history. Wherever you look today — whether it is the world of journalism, with bloggers bringing down Dan Rather; the world of software, with the Linux code writers working in online forums for free to challenge Microsoft; or the world of business, where Indian and Chinese innovators are competing against and working with some of the most advanced Western multinationals — hierarchies are being flattened and value is being created less and less within vertical silos and more and more through horizontal collaboration within companies, between companies and among individuals.”
Keep in mind that neither linux nor multinationals existed before either.
“I am talking about the people of China, India, Russia, Eastern Europe, Latin America and Central Asia. Their economies and political systems all opened up during the course of the 1990’s so that their people were increasingly free to join the free market.”
Thedreamless figures of economy and inherent necessity fill the old place of freedom. Free is the person who exactly wants what he should.
“Said Craig Barrett, the C.E.O. of Intel, ”You don’t bring three billion people into the world economy overnight without huge consequences, especially from three societies” — like India, China and Russia — ”with rich educational heritages.””
English as a lingua fracta, spoken yet not fully comprehended is no rich education. (I realize that you often quote other people but nevertheless you make the selection.)
“They have a saying at Microsoft about their Asia center, which captures the intensity of competition it takes to win a job there and explains why it is already the most productive research team at Microsoft: ”Remember, in China, when you are one in a million, there are 1,300 other people just like you.””
Further down you lay emphasis on the individual. This is contradictory.
“an electronic-game company from Bangalore, which today owns the rights to Charlie Chaplin’s image for mobile computer games”
I am not impressed. This is not real culture.
“That is what is going to happen to so many jobs — they will go to that corner of the world where there is the least resistance and the most opportunity.”
These are words that have something to hide. They paint more than they actually say.
“If there is a skilled person in Timbuktu, he will get work if he knows how to access the rest of the world, which is quite easy today. You can make a Web site and have an e-mail address and you are up and running.”
Simply not true. Definitely not from bottom-up perspective.
“(…) if you are diligent and clean in your transactions, then you are in business.”
Where is enlightenment?
“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, and the main objective in this era is building strong individuals.”
The opposite is true. The senctence the economy cares for the individuum is not valid anymore.
“(…) broadband infrastructure, portable pensions and health care that will help every American become more employable in an age in which no one can guarantee you lifetime employment.”
What exactly are “portable pensions”? Reduced pensions?
“While the other end of the hot line 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 United Nations, and it has none of the sinister snarl of the bad guys in ”From Russia With Love.” 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?””
Even though being unjust, communism represented an antidote to a today totally unleashed predator capitalism. As for India, the views of Noam Chomsky and native Arundhati Roy though extreme contain some core of truth to them. They go as far to call it semi-faschism.
“Here is the dirty little secret that no C.E.O. wants to tell you: they are not just outsourcing to save on salary. They are doing it because they can often get better-skilled and more productive people than their American workers.”
The movement of labor eastwards is indeed mainly for salary reasons. And by the way: “dirty little secret”, “bad guys”? Why this tone?
“The percentage of a population with a college degree is important, but so are sheer numbers. In 2001, India graduated almost a million more students from college than the United States did. China graduates twice as many students with bachelor’s degrees as the U.S., and they have six times as many graduates majoring in engineering.”
What about the quality of those degrees? In Europe for example, they are getting inflationary and at the same time more superficial.
“When I was growing up, my parents used to say to me, ”Tom, finish your dinner — people in China are starving.” But after sailing to the edges of the flat world for a year, I am now telling my own daughters, ”Girls, finish your homework — people in China and India are starving for your jobs.””
Large portions of these societies are still starving. The last Indian elections are often portrayed as a votum on exactly this issue.
The statistics quoted are fine for the purposes of a general argument, but one has to consider the fact that the quality of engineers produced by India does NOT match the exacting, higher standards of American engineering schools. Barring a couple of technical institutions (like the Indian Institutes of Technology, for example) engineering education in India is in the pits.
And I can say this since I am from India, have been to Indian schools, but am student of engineering here in the United States. My sister, four years younger, just got through one of the better colleges (much to her relief) by way of an intensely competitive examination in my home state in India. Competitive since there’s only so many ‘good’ schools, at least for engineering. And given that she’s studying the same discipline of engineering as I am, even at this ‘good’ school, I can confidently tell you that the inherent quality of technical education comes nowhere near American standards. You might pin this on the money available to technical institutes in India (for a better infrastructure when it comes to a technical education) or blame it on a kind of herd mentality with the Indian population for an engineering education, which in turn fuels the establishment of horrible, third-rate institutes which churn out engineers by the dozen. I’m talking electrical engineering graduates who don’t know the units of inductance. I’m talking aerospace engineers who don’t know Stokes’ Law. I’m talking electronics engineers who don’t know what a MOSFET does.
So, while these statistics can be used for a myriad of purposes, like scaring the public into how many more job will be siphoned off into places like India, one must bear in mind that the reins of actual research and development will be held by the United States for a long time to come.
The point you are missing is that it is the American system, the one in place from the begining that is the unique factor. It is ruthlessly democratic, capitalistic, and individualistic. It is what has allowed the US to grow to it’s current status…not the number or percentage of college graduates.
These same uniquely American traits will determine its future too because the US poulation is still growing and there is much infrastructure in place waiting for development. Fly over the Canada/US border sometime and you will see; lots of roads and open space…
And think about this, who’s to say that India won’t be the 51rst state someday? They speak English. Maybe Canada could be 52nd… if only they’d stop drinking beer and joking around so much and get some more college age kids graduating up there.
;p