Quiet Crisis

The Quiet Crisis
[excerpts from The World is Flat (2005)
by Thomas L. Friedman]

You could find no better metaphor for the way the rest of the world can now compete head-to-head more effectively than ever with America than the struggles of the U. S. Olympic basketball team in 2004.  The American team, made up of NBA stars, limped home to a bronze medal after losing to Puerto Rico, Lithuania, and Argentina.  Previously, the United States had lost only one game in the history of the modern Olympics.  Remember when America sent only NCAA stars to the Olympic basketball events?  For a long time these teams totally dominated all comers.  Then they started getting challenged . . . [The] automatic American superiority of twenty years ago is now gone in Olympic basketball.  The NBA standard is increasingly becoming a global commodity . . . If the United States want to continue to dominate in Olympic basketball, we must, in that great sports cliche, step it up a notch.  The old standard won't do anymore . . .

Sports writer John Feinstein could have been referring to either American engineering skills or American basketball skills when he wrote in an August 26, 2004, AOL essay on Olympic basketball that the performance of the U. S. team is a result of "the rise of the international player" and "the decline and fall of the U. S. game."  And the decline and fall of the U. S. game, argued Feinstein, is a result of two long-term trends.  The first is a steady decline "in basketball skills," with American kids just wanting to shoot either three-point shots or dunk . . . And there is also that ugly little problem of ambition.  While the rest of the world was getting better in basketball, "more and more NBA players were yawning at the notion of playing in the Olympics," noted Feinstein.  "We have come a long way from 1984, when Bob Knight told Charles Barkley to show up to the second Olympic training camp at 265 pounds or else.  Barkley showed up weighing 280.  Knight cut him that day.  In today's world, the Olympic coach wouldn't even have checked Barkley's weight in the first place.  He would have sent a limousine to the airport to get him and stopped at Dunkin' Donuts on the way to the hotel if the player requested it . . . The world changes.  In the case of American basketball, it hasn't changed for the better."

There is something about post-World War II American that reminds me of the classic wealthy family that by the third generation starts to squander its wealth.  The members of the first generation are nose-to-the-grindstone innovators; the second generation holds it all together; then their kids come along and get fat, dumb, and lazy and slowly squander it all.  I know that is overly harsh and a gross generalization, but there is, nevertheless, some truth in it.  American society started to coast in the 1990s, when our third postwar generation came of age.  The dot-com boom left too many people with the impression that they could get rich without investing in hard work. . . But while we were admiring the flat world we had created, a lot of people in India, China, and Eastern Europe were busy figuring out how to take advantage of it.  Lucky for us, we were the only economy standing after World War II, and we had no serious competition for forty years.  That gave us a huge head of steam but also a huge sense of entitlement and complacency--not to mention a certain tendency in recent years to extol consumption over hard work, investment, and long-term thinking . . .

This chapter is about how we Americans, individually and collectively, have not been doing the 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 the president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute since 1999.  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."

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 shrinking pool of young people with the knowledge and 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 innovating 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." . . . [250-253]

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 . . . [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 old or older, and the average age is steadily rising. . . .

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. . . . [256-257]

Dirty Little Secret #2: The Ambition Gap

The second dirty little secret . . . goes like this: When they send jobs abroad, they not only save 75 percent on wages, they get a 100 percent increase in productivity.  Part of that is understandable.  When you take a low-wage, low-prestige job in America, like a call center operator, and bring it over to India, where it becomes a high-wage, high-prestige job, you end up with workers who are paid less but motivated more.  "The dirty little secret is that not only is [outsourcing] cheaper and efficient," the American CEO of a London-headquartered multinational told me, "but the quality and productivity [boost] is huge." . . . "When you think it's only about wages, " he added, you can still hold your dignity, but the fact that they work better is awful."

A short time after returning from India, I was approached in an airport by a young man who wanted to talk about some columns I had written from there. . . His name is Mike Arguello, and he is an IT systems architect living in San Antonio.  He does high-end IT systems design and does not feel threatened by foreign competition.  He also teaches computer science.  When I asked him what we needed to do in America to get our edge back, he sent me this e-mail:

I taught at a local university.  It was disheartening to see the poor work ethic of many of my students.  Of the students I taught over six semesters, I'd only consider hiring two of them.  The rest lacked creativity, problem-solving abilities and passion for learning . . . The Indians that I work with are the cream of the crop.  They are educated by the equivalents of MIT back in India and there are plenty of them.  If you were to follow me in my daily meetings it would become very obvious that a great deal of my time is spent working with Indians . . .Low education means low-paying jobs, plain and simple, and this is where more and more Americans are finding themselves.  Many Americans can't believe they aren't qualified for high-paying jobs.  I call this the "American Idol problem."  If you've ever seen the reaction of contestants when Simon Cowell tells them they have no talent, they look at him in total disbelief.  I'm just hoping someday I'm not given such a rude awakening . . .

[One consular official who oversees the granting of visas at the U. S. embassy in Beijing told me] " I do think Americans are oblivious to the huge changes.  Every American who comes over to visit me [in China] is just blown away . . . Your average kid in the U.S. is growing up in a wealthy country with many opportunities, and many are the kids of advantaged educated people and have a sense of entitlement.  Well, the hard reality for that kid is that fifteen years from now Wu is going to be his boss and Zhou is going to be the doctor in town.  The competition is coming, and many of the kids are going to move into their twenties clueless about these rising forces."

When I asked Bill Gates about the supposed American education advantage--an education the stresses creativity, not rote learning--he was utterly dismissive.  In his view, those who think that the more rote learning systems of China and Japan can't turn out innovators who can compete with Americans are sadly mistaken.  Said Gates, "I have never met the guy who doesn't know how to multiply who created software . . . Who has the most creative video games in the world?  Japan!  I never met these 'rote people' . . . Some of my best software engineers are Japanese.  You need to understand things in order to invent beyond them."

One cannot stress enough: Young Chinese, Indians, and Poles are not racing us to the bottom.  They are racing us to the top.  They do not want to work for us; they don't even want to be us.  They want to dominate us--in the sense that they want to be creating the companies of the future that people all over the world will admire and clamor to work for.  They are in no way content with where they have come so far . . .

In China today, Bill Gates is Britney Spears.  In American today, Britney Spears is Britney Spears--and that is our problem.[260-265]

Dirty Little Secret #3: The Education Gap

All of this helps to explain the third dirty little secret: A lot of the jobs that are starting to go abroad today are very high-end research jobs, because not only is the talent abroad cheaper, but a lot if it is as educated as American workers--or even more so.  In China, there are 1.3 billion people and the universities are just starting to crack the top ranks, the competition for top spots is ferocious.  The math/science salmon that swims upstream in China and gets itself admitted to a top Chinese university or hired by a foreign company is one smart fish.  The folks at Microsoft have a saying about their research center in Beijing, which, for scientists and engineers, is one of the most sought-after places to work in all of China.  "Remember, in China when you are one in a million--there are 1,300 other people just like you."

The brainpower that rises to the Microsoft research center in Beijing is already one in a million . . .

The sky is not falling today, but it might be in fifteen or twenty years if we don't change our ways, and all signs are that we are not changing, especially in our public schools.  Help is not on the way.  The American education system from kindergarten through twelfth grade just is not stimulating enough young people to want to go into science, math, and engineering . . .

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 Tracy Koon, [Intel's director of corporate affairs, who oversees the company's efforts to improve science education].  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? . . ."

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. [265-275]

QUESTIONS:
1) Why does the author use the men's Olympic basketball team as a metaphor?  Explain his point.
2) What, in your own words, does the "quiet crisis" mean? 
3) Evaluate Friedman's argument.  Do you primarily agree or disagree with his analysis?

Note: Remember that you are only reading very brief excerpts taken from a much longer argument from a chapter excerpted from a book of almost 500 pages.  If you really want to dig into Friedman's argument, then read the book or check it out at your local library.