The World Is Flat (37 page)

In the previous chapters, I showed why both classic economic theory and the inherent strengths of the American economy have convinced me that American individuals have nothing to worry about from a flat world-provided we roll up our sleeves, be ready to compete, get every individual to think about how he or she upgrades his or her educational skills, and keep investing in the secrets of the American sauce. Those chapters were all about what we must do and can do.

This chapter is about how we Americans, individually and collectively, have not been doing all these things that we should be doing and what will happen down the road if we don't change course.

The truth is, we are in a crisis now, but it is a crisis that is unfolding very slowly and very quietly. It is “a quiet crisis,” explained Shirley Ann Jackson, the 2004 president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute since 1999. (Rensselaer is America's oldest technological college, founded in 1824.) And this quiet crisis involves the steady erosion of America's scientific and engineering base, which has always been the source of American innovation and our rising standard of living.

“The sky is not falling, nothing horrible is going to happen today,” said Jackson, a physicist by training who chooses her words carefully. “The U.S. is still the leading engine for innovation in the world. It has the best graduate programs, the best scientific infrastructure, and the capital markets to exploit it. But there is a quiet crisis in U.S. science and technology that we have to wake up to. The U.S. today is in a truly global environment, and those competitor countries are not only wide awake, they are running a marathon while we are running sprints. If left unchecked, this could challenge our preeminence and capacity to innovate.”

And it is our ability to constantly innovate new products, services, and companies that has been the source of America's horn of plenty and steadily widening middle class for the last two centuries. It was American innovators who started Google, Intel, HP, Dell, Microsoft, and Cisco, and it matters where innovation happens. The fact that all these companies are headquartered in America means that most of the high-paying jobs are here, even if these companies outsource or offshore some functions. The executives, the department heads, the sales force, and the senior researchers are all located in the cities where the innovation happened. And their jobs create more jobs. The shrinking of the pool of young people with the knowledge skills to innovate won't shrink our standard of living overnight. It will be felt only in fifteen or twenty years, when we discover we have a critical shortage of scientists and engineers capable of doing innovation or even just high-value-added technology work. Then this won't be a quiet crisis anymore, said Jackson, “it will be the real McCoy.”

Shirley Ann Jackson knows of what she speaks, because her career exemplifies as well as anyone's both why America thrived so much in the past fifty years and why it won't automatically do the same in the next fifty. An African-American woman, Jackson was born in Washington, D.C., in 1946. She started kindergarten in a segregated public school but was one of the first public school students to benefit from desegregation, as a result of the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Just when she was getting a chance to go to a better school, the Russians launched Sputnik in 1957, and the U.S. government became obsessed with educating young people to become scientists and engineers, a trend that was intensified by John F. Kennedy's commitment to a manned space program. When Kennedy spoke about putting a man on the moon, Shirley Ann Jackson was one of the millions of American young people who were listening. His words, she recalled, “inspired, assisted, and launched many of my generation into science, engineering and mathematics,” and the breakthroughs and inventions they spawned went well beyond the space program. “The space race was really a science race,” she said.

Thanks in part to desegregation, both Jackson's inspiration and intellect were recognized early, and she ultimately became the first African-American woman to earn a Ph.D. in physics from MIT (her degree was in theoretical elementary particle physics). From there, she spent many years working for AT&T Bell Laboratories, and in 1995 was appointed by President Clinton to chair the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

As the years went by, though, Jackson began to notice that fewer and fewer young Americans were captivated by national challenges like the race to the moon, or felt the allure of math, science, and engineering. In universities, she noted, graduate enrollment in science and engineering programs, having grown for decades, peaked in 1993, and despite some recent progress, it remains today below the level of a decade ago. So the science and engineering generations that followed Jackson's got smaller and smaller relative to our needs. By the time Jackson took the job as Rensselaer Polytechnic's president to put her heart and soul into reinvig-orating American science and engineering, she realized, she said, that a “perfect storm” was brewing-one that posed a real long-term danger to America's economic health-and she started speaking out about it whenever she could.

“The phrase 'the perfect storm' is associated with meteorological events in October 1991,” said Jackson in a speech in May 2004, when “a powerful weather system gathered force, ravaging the Atlantic Ocean over the course of several days, [and] caused the deaths of several Massachusetts-based fishermen and billions of dollars of damage. The event became a book, and, later, a movie. Meteorologists observing the event emphasized... the unlikely confluence of conditions... in which multiple factors converged to bring about an event of devastating magnitude. [A] similar worst-case scenario could arrest the progress of our national scientific and technological capacity. The forces at work are multiple and complex. They are demographic, political, economic, cultural, even social.” Individually, each of these forces would be problematic, added Jackson. In combination, they could be devastating. “For the first time in more than a century, the United States could well find itself falling behind other countries in the capacity for scientific discovery, innovation and economic development.”

The way to avoid being caught in such a storm is to identify the confluence of factors and to change course-even though right now the sky is blue, the winds are gentle, and the water seems calm. But that is not what has been going on in America in recent years. We are blithely sailing along, heading straight for the storm, with both politicians and parents insisting that no dramatic changes or sacrifices are required now. After all, look how calm and sunny it is outside, they tell us. In the fiscal year 2005 budget passed by the Republican-led Congress in November 2004, the budget for the National Science Foundation, which is the federal body most responsible for promoting research and funding more and better science education, was actually cut by 1.9 percent, or $105 million. History will show that when America should have been doubling the NSF funding, its Congress passed a pork-laden budget that actually cut assistance for science and engineering.

Don't be fooled by the calm. That's always the time to change course-not when you're just about to get hit by the typhoon. We don't have any time to waste in addressing the “dirty little secrets” of our education system.

Dirty Little Secret #1: The Numbers Gap

In the Cold War, one of the deepest causes of American worries was the so-called missile gap between us and the Soviet Union. The perfect storm Shirley Ann Jackson is warning about could best be described as the confluence of three new gaps that have been slowly emerging to sap America's prowess in science, math, and engineering. They are the numbers gap, the ambition gap, and the education gap. In the Age of Flatism, these gaps are what most threaten our standard of living.

Dirty little secret number one is that the generation of scientists and engineers who were motivated to go into science by the threat of Sputnik in 1957 and the inspiration of JFK are reaching their retirement years and are not being replaced in the numbers that they must be if an advanced economy like that of the United States is to remain at the head of the pack. According to the National Science Foundation, half of America's scientists and engineers are forty years or older, and the average age is steadily rising.

Just take one example-NASA. An analysis of NASA records conducted by the newspaper Florida Today (March 7, 2004), which covers the Kennedy Space Center, showed the following: Nearly 40 percent of the 18,146 people at NASA are age fifty or older. Those with twenty years of government service are eligible for early retirement. Twenty-two percent of NASA workers are fifty-five or older. NASA employees over sixty outnumber those under thirty by a ratio of about three to one. Only 4 percent of NASA workers are under thirty. A 2003 Government Accounting Office study concluded that NASA was having difficulty hiring people with the sufficient science, engineering, and information-technology skills that are critical to its operations. Many of these jobs are reserved for American citizens, because of national security concerns. Then-NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe testified before Congress in 2002: “Our mission of understanding and protecting our home planet and exploring the universe and searching for life will not be carried out if we don't have the people to do it.” The National Commission on Mathematics and Science Teaching for the Twenty-first Century, chaired by the former astronaut and senator John Glenn, found that two-thirds of the nation's mathematics and science teaching force will retire by 2010.

Traditionally we made up for any shortages of engineers and science faculty by educating more at home and importing more from abroad. But both of those remedies have been stalled of late.

Every two years the National Science Board supervises the collection of a very broad set of data trends in science and technology in the United States, which it publishes as Science and Engineering Indicators. In preparing Indicators 2004, the NSB said, “We have observed a troubling decline in the number of U.S. citizens who are training to become scientists and engineers, whereas the number of jobs requiring science and engineering (S&E) training continues to grow.” These trends threaten the economic welfare and security of our country, it said, adding that if the trends identified in Indicators 2004 continue undeterred, three things will happen: “The number of jobs in the U.S. economy that require science and engineering training will grow; the number of U.S. citizens prepared for those jobs will, at best, be level; and the availability of people from other countries who have science and engineering training will decline, either because of limits to entry imposed by U.S. national security restrictions or because of intense global competition for people with these skills.”

The NSB report found that the number of American eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds who receive science degrees has fallen to seventeenth in the world, whereas we ranked third three decades ago. It said that of the 2.8 million first university degrees (what we call bachelor's degrees) in science and engineering granted worldwide in 2003, 1.2 million were earned by Asian students in Asian universities, 830,000 were granted in Europe, and 400,000 in the United States. In engineering specifically, universities in Asian countries now produce eight times as many bachelor's degrees as the United States.

Moreover, “the proportional emphasis on science and engineering is greater in other nations,” noted Shirley Ann Jackson. Science and engineering degrees now represent 60 percent of all bachelor's degrees earned in China, 33 percent in South Korea, and 41 percent in Taiwan. By contrast, the percentage of those taking a bachelor's degree in science and engineering in the United States remains at roughly 31 percent. Factoring out science degrees, the number of Americans who graduate with just engineering degrees is 5 percent, as compared to 25 percent in Russia and 46 percent in China, according to a 2004 report by Trilogy Publications, which represents the national U.S. engineering professional association.

The United States has always depended on the inventiveness of its people in order to compete in the world marketplace, said the NSB. “Preparation of the S&E workforce is a vital arena for national competitiveness. [But] even if action is taken today to change these trends, the reversal is 10 to 20 years away.” The students entering the science and engineering workforce with advanced degrees in 2004 decided to take the necessary math courses to enable this career path when they were in middle school, up to fourteen years ago, the NSB noted. The students making that same decision in middle school today won't complete advanced training for science and engineering occupations until 2018 or 2020. “If action is not taken now to change these trends, we could reach 2020 and find that the ability of U.S. research and education institutions to regenerate has been damaged and that their preeminence has been lost to other areas of the world,” the science board said.

These shortages could not be happening at a worse time-just when the world is going flat. “The number of jobs requiring science and engineering skills in the U.S. labor force,” the NSB said, “is growing almost 5 percent per year. In comparison, the rest of the labor force is growing at just over 1 percent. Before September 11, 2001, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) projected that science and engineering occupations would increase at three times the rate of all occupations.” Unfortunately, the NSB reported, the average age of the science and engineering workforce is rising.

“Many of those who entered the expanding S&E workforce in the 1960s and 1970s (the baby boom generation) are expected to retire in the next twenty years, and their children are not choosing science and engineering careers in the same numbers as their parents,” the NSB report said. “The percentage of women, for example, choosing math and computer science careers fell 4 percentage points between 1993 and 1999.”

The 2002 NSB indicators showed that the number of science and engineering Ph.D.'s awarded in the United States dropped from 29,000 in 1998 to 27,000 in 1999. The total number of engineering undergraduates in America fell about 12 percent between the mid-1980s and 1998.