* Ready or not, globalism is here
A colleague of mine recently attended a very interesting luncheon in which Bill Archey, CEO of the American Electronics Association, spoke about the finality of the global marketplace. Not normally one given to dialog about internationalism, my colleague was excited, maybe a little distressed too, about what she’d learned from the speaker. Archey said some interesting things:
He believes that, like it or not, ready or not, the global marketplace is in place and is fully functional. We no longer compete in a localized environment of which we are familiar and are sure of our place. AeA has written a commentary on this topic called: “Losing the Competitive Advantage? The Challenge for Science and Technology in the United States, February 2005” (available for download at https://www.aeanet.org/publications/IDJJ_AeA_Competitiveness.asp). In the e-mail advertisement for the luncheon, Archey says: “Even if the U.S. were doing everything right, the world still poses unprecedented competitive challenges. But we are not doing everything right.”
How so? After all, it is the U.S. that has Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Intel, HP, Dell and myriad other top-rung technology firms. Archey’s point is that there are very few young people in the U.S. who are studying the hard sciences, including computer science. This would negatively impact our ability to sustain our role as the world’s technology leader.
And since the U.S. isn’t proactively educating and raising up hard-sciences educated technologists in the form of engineers and scientists, the propensity for outsourcing could increase in the U.S. as time goes on. Without this brain trust, it will be tough to innovate and bring new products to market. Outsourcing to countries that are developing these strengths will have to increase, simply to fill the need.
Further, at the luncheon, Archey went on to say that we have an invisible border closure. He says that it used to be that people from overseas would come to our universities to garner top-notch technical and scientific educations. Then, they’d stay here a few years, intern and grow in what they’d learn and ultimately head back to their homeland, leaving as friends of the U.S. for what we’d imparted to them. But now, two important things have happened: a) Top-grade technical and scientific universities exist elsewhere in the world – if we ever did, we no longer hold the reins on intellectual capital, and b) We won’t let those from overseas into our schools any longer (or they don’t want to come here to school anymore – pick your poison.) So the gains that we might’ve had with overseas students coming here and potentially staying is rapidly diminishing. And, we’re not growing enough stock of our own.
Don’t believe that we no longer possess the educational rocket fuel we need to keep us in the forefront of technology? Consider a recent report written by the Kaiser Foundation (http://www.kff.org) entitled “Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year-olds,” in which the authors state that young people today spend nearly 6.5 hours with media (Internet, movies, magazines, music, TV and video games). Sure, they allege, these youngsters are often doing their homework, but they’re also multi-tasking, IMing their friends at the same time as they listen to the iPODs.
Jumping to conclusions comparing the two articles? I don’t know: It’s one thing to play a lot of video games. It’s another to program them! It’s one thing to listen to an MP3, it’s another to invent new media standards.
Yes, we still have a lot of great ideas and concepts. But we are on the slippery slope of losing our technological grip if we can’t fill up the reserves with new, fresh technologists.
Thoughts?
