Geek Heresy (30 page)

But none of these explanations satisfied the Pakistani professionals I met. Pakistan, too, had been open to foreign investment since at least 1991. The Y2K crisis was worldwide, and Pakistani companies could have risen to the opportunity. The Pakistani elite also speak English.

The real secret, evident all around me in my Bangalore office, was India’s decades-long cultivation of its brightest engineers through institutions such as the IITs. As anyone in Silicon Valley can tell you, IIT stands for the Indian Institute of Technology, a set of universities that graduate the country’s top technical talent. They were inaugurated in 1953 by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and today the acceptance rate at these government-subsidized schools is lower than that of Harvard’s or MIT’s. At a fiftieth-anniversary celebration in 2003, the CEOs of Amazon, Cisco, and Microsoft not only praised the institution for being “unique,” “incredible,” and “world class,” but also thanked it for its global contribution.
²⁸
Bill Gates said, “The computer industry has benefited greatly from the tradition of the IITs.” He was right to be grateful – at Microsoft, as many as 20 percent of the employees are from India, many of them IIT alumni.

With so many graduates going abroad, you might wonder what the IITs are really doing for India. But their departure doesn’t necessarily mean a permanent brain drain. AnnaLee Saxenian at Berkeley’s School of Information found that, when the conditions are right, brain drain can turn into beneficial “brain circulation.”
²⁹
In her book
The New Argonauts
, she ascribed much of the success of the technology sector in India – as well as in Israel, Taiwan, and other countries – to exactly this phenomenon.

A perfect example of brain circulation is my former manager at Microsoft Research. P. Anandan graduated in the late 1970s from IIT Madras and left soon afterward for the United States to pursue a master’s degree. A PhD followed, and then research jobs at Sarnoff Corporation and Microsoft. By the time I began working for him, he had lived
happily in America for about twenty-five years. He was a classic case of Indian brain drain.

Until he wasn’t. For as long as I had known him, Anandan had lobbied to support Indian computer science research. He had started an internship program for Indian students. He had made frequent trips to Indian universities. He had consolidated support from Indian executives at Microsoft. So one day, the management, going all the way up to Bill Gates, gave the green light for a research lab in India with Anandan as its founding director. A few months later, with me in tow, he moved back to a country he had not lived in for a quarter of a century.

This is Saxenian’s theory in action. Anandan brought to Microsoft Research India all of the skills, attitudes, and social networks he had cultivated abroad. As we set up the lab, we tried to bring in the best of American research culture – academic quality, intellectual openness, minimal hierarchy, and unapologetic pride. As a result, we were able to attract some of the strongest computer scientists in the world, including quite a few who, like Anandan, were born and educated in India and had spent years abroad as researchers. (Of course, we merged all of this with a distinctly Indian culture, as well: Our employees were decidedly more open on a personal basis with each other than I have experienced elsewhere. There was tremendous acceptance of diverse thinking and processes. And we were masters of brinkmanship – event preparations miraculously came together at the last possible moment.)

The role of the IITs is mirrored by other reputable educational institutions in India, including the Indian Institute of Science, the University of Delhi, the Indian Institutes of Management, and the All India Institute of Medical Sciences. And technology-sector success is influencing India’s other industries.

Where can we locate the true origins of the large-scale change that started with the Indian technology sector? Though it was undoubtedly enabled by foreign direct investment, high-caliber engineering education and internationally experienced managers were absolute
preconditions. A single change in law wasn’t enough. We can see this because we know that foreign direct investment in and of itself isn’t sufficient. In India, economic benefits have gone disproportionately to the well educated – though the whole country lives under the same laws, recall that over 800 million people there still live on under $2 a day. And around the world, the lowering of investment barriers doesn’t automatically result in a thriving IT sector. Pakistan, Brazil, Kenya, and Sri Lanka are all trying to various degrees, but unlike the passing of investment policy or the importing of hardware and software, talent takes at least a generation to mature. India’s growth was predicated on decades spent building human capacity – some of it deliberately fostered by wise decisions in Nehru’s generation, some of it built up as individuals pursued their aspirations abroad. The packaged intervention of finance reforms amplified national intrinsic growth.

It’s also important that what is superficially a story of technology and economic growth is at least as much a story of changes in heart, mind, and will. If you visit newer tech companies in India, you can’t help but notice how much they differ from the country’s more established businesses. Sure, the buildings glitter with glass façades, and there are foosball tables in the hallways. But the bigger differences are in workplace culture and in the social norms that employees take for granted. For example, India’s traditional industries tend to be run in a command-and-control manner. Your boss always knows best, and you do what he tells you to do. India’s tech industry tends to be flatter. I saw this difference all the time: People we hired from outside of the tech sector took time to adjust, either because people didn’t respond well to their barked orders, or because they were suddenly asked not to call their managers “Sir.” Another difference is a reevaluation of what counts as career success. An earlier generation almost uniformly saw a stable job as the height of accomplishment. College graduates wanted to become doctors, lawyers, and government bureaucrats. Today, mere financial security has lost its sheen. The most ambitious IIT graduates are leaving large corporations to start their own companies. They’re aspiring for greater esteem, achievement, and self-actualization.

Self-Actualizing Creative Class

Inglehart’s analysis tapered off with the service sector, and that’s where the sociologist Richard Florida picked things up. He extended the analysis with investigations of what he popularized as the
creative class
.
³⁰
These are “scientists, engineers, artists, musicians, designers and knowledge-based professionals” who are “paid principally to do creative work for a living.”
³¹

The rise of the creative class is an international phenomenon led by developed-world cities. Florida estimated that in the United States the creative class grew from 3 million to 38 million people between 1900 and 2000, or from 10 percent to 30 percent of the working population. A “Super-Creative Core” went from 2.5 percent in 1900 to 12 percent in 2000. But these figures underestimate the influence of the creative class, who, combined, command half the wages of the US workforce, control many of the most powerful institutions in the country, and design the form and content of the goods that consumers buy. In economically advanced European countries, the creative class makes up a similar share of the workforce.
³²

Among the creative class, self-actualization is a prominent theme. Florida wrote, “Creative workers do not merely move up the scale in Abraham Maslow’s classic hierarchy of needs. Most are not very worried about meeting the basic needs of subsistence; they’re already on the upper rungs of the ladder, where intrinsic rewards such as esteem and self-actualization are sought.”
³³

Florida’s creative class is less motivated by the lower levels of Maslow’s hierarchy: Money represents not survival and security but “just a way to keep score,” and “the best people in any field are motivated by passion.”
³⁴
Even esteem needs take a particular form. Florida found that those in the creative class who are born into money “no longer find true status in their wealth and thus try to downplay it.” Instead they seek “the chance to win the esteem and recognition of others in the know.”
³⁵

Thus, members of Florida’s creative class work primarily because they love what they do, just as Maslow’s self-actualizers do. The creative
class values autonomy and diversity, just as self-actualizers do. Members of the creative class are confident of their ability to fulfill basic needs; when their jobs are threatened, their primary worry is not that they’ll lose income, but that they’ll have to settle for “just a job.”

One graph in Florida’s book captures the link between individual aspiration and national demographics. In 1900 agriculture was at its peak, employing nearly 40 percent of the workforce, but it was soon taken over by a reign of the working class, which usurped a similar chunk of the workforce between 1910 and 1960. Since the 1970s, the service class has been dominant, with about 45 percent of the workforce, but this dominance is now poised to fade as the creative, self-actualizing class continues its climb. These labor cycles are stark reminders that mass shifts in individual Maslovian development correlate with national socioeconomic growth.

The Chicken
and
the Egg

Inglehart and Florida’s core claims stress that national changes correlate with changes in individual aspirations. You can’t have one without the other.

If this seems obvious, it’s worth recalling that social causes are suffused with attempts to impose supposedly wise outcomes from the outside without any attention to people’s values and aspirations. Projects focus on bed nets, laptops, and improved seeds but with minimal focus on nurturing the people who will use them. Increased GDP is always cheered, even if it’s caused by skyrocketing health-care costs, or a few rich people getting richer while everyone else languishes. Elections are expected to lead to democracy even in places where internal institutions and social norms are not ready for it. So many projects seek to improve a superficial condition rather than bringing about deeper change.

Institutions hastily built without a foundation of intrinsic growth have a nasty habit of evaporating. The democracies of Iraq and Afghanistan are good examples. Inglehart and Welzel launched a stinging attack on any notion that holding elections creates happier, more tolerant, or more freedom-loving people. Their data show that in the
post-Soviet countries, the transition to democracy in the 1990s was followed by decreases in trust, tolerance, and happiness. This is significant, because “whether democracy takes root seems to depend on the strength of self-expression values far more than on simple habituation through living under democratic institutions.” They concluded, “Even the best-designed institutions need a compatible mass culture.”
³⁶
Democratic packaged interventions only work when the underlying citizen values are conducive to them.

So which comes first – individual intrinsic growth, or societal intrinsic development?
³⁷
The likely answer is that they cause each other. Individual growth tends to lead to national growth and vice versa. Socioeconomic growth and Maslovian development, like many strongly correlated social phenomena, are mutually reinforcing, at least up to a certain point of wealth. As people become richer, they aspire toward something more than mere survival. And as more people aspire to something beyond survival, society makes itself richer.

As long as individual and societal growth fortify each other, we should attend to the controllable causes of both. At an individual level, we should strive for intrinsic growth in ourselves and others. At a societal level, we should seek to establish institutions and policies that reflect and foster societal heart, mind, and will. And as for the political will to follow through, what is political will, other than mass intrinsic growth?

A Compassionate Class?

Earlier in this chapter, we encountered Narasimha, an example of an individual undergoing intrinsic growth who is a member of India’s working class. Now I turn to children of the more comfortable classes in India, among whom another form of growth is taking place. They are more concerned with other aspirations.

Among the researchers I worked with in India were Nimmi, a housewife and mother who dusted off a degree in social anthropology to turn to the study of technology in urban slums; Saurabh, a talented computer scientist who thought about what he could do for India’s underachieving school system; Aishwarya, a passionate development
economist who balanced her academic calling and public service; and Indrani, a design researcher who wanted to coax more social impact out of her research.

They all came from relatively well-off families, and while their concerns were unique, they were largely indifferent to financial and social security. Instead they sought esteem, achievement, and self-actualization to various degrees and also felt the pull of self-transcendence. Viewed against the backdrop of their parents’ generation, they exhibited a change in aspiration – they wanted to share what they had with less privileged communities.

If the creative class represents mass self-actualization, then it’s tantalizing to imagine mass self-transcendence leading to a
compassionate class
. Imagine a country whose own needs are thoroughly met and whose dominant aspirations are world peace and prosperity. Such a country would let go of economic growth as its primary national goal, though it would still be able to meet the needs of its own citizens. It would be a nation of self-sufficient, altruistic people seeking to encourage intrinsic growth in themselves and others, and
not
in the self-serving or proselytizing way of a neocolonial White Man’s Burden.